Every ceiling reached becomes a floor.
ALDOUS HUXLEYThe propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
More Aldous Huxley Quotes
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Dictators can always consolidate their tyranny by an appeal to patriotism.
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Children are nowhere taught, in any systematic way, to distinguish true from false, or meaningful from meaningless, statements. Why is this so? Because their elders, even in the democratic countries, do not want them to be given this kind of education.
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The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information.
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People often ask me what is the most effective technique for transforming their life. It is a little embarrassing that after years and years of research and experimentation, I have to say that the best answer is – just be a little kinder.
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That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
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The greater part of the population is not very intelligent, dreads responsibility, and desires nothing better than to be told what to do. Provided the rulers do not interfere with its material comforts and its cherished beliefs, it is perfectly happy to let itself be ruled.
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Hitler’s vast propaganda successes were accomplished with little more than the radio and loudspeaker, and without TV and tape and video recording . . . Today the art of mind control is in the process of becoming a science.
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Higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue.
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Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.
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All that is needed is money and a candidate who can be coached to look sincere. Political principles and plans for specific action have come to lose most of their importance. The personality of the candidate, the way he is projected by the advertising experts, are the things that really matter.
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A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind.
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A mind that has come to the stillness of wisdom shall know being, shall know what it is to love. Love is neither personal nor impersonal. Love is love, not to be defined or described by the mind as exclusive or inclusive. Love is its own eternity; it is the real, the supreme, the immeasurable.
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Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn’t become king. He gets lynched.
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People intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are.
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But the nature of the universe is such that ends can never justify means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end.
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Liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government.
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The trouble with fiction,” said John Rivers, “is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.
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The goal in life is to discover that you’ve always been where you were supposed to be.
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A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.
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Human beings act in a great variety of irrational ways, but all of them seem to be capable, if given a fair chance, of making a reasonable choice in the light of available evidence. Democratic institutions can be made to work only if all concerned do their best to impart knowledge and to encourage rationality.
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The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
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By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself.
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Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare, it is simply disgraceful.
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Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.
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The development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.
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Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and more terrible becomes the price that must be paid.
ALDOUS HUXLEY