If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons, that would not be progress. For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure; as a monster he was superb.
ALDOUS HUXLEYTo be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style.
More Aldous Huxley Quotes
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Experience teaches only the teachable.
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Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects… totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.
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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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One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.
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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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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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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 propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
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Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence – those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.
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I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
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Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.
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If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.
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Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.
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An intellectual is a person who’s found one thing that’s more interesting than sex.
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Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced.
ALDOUS HUXLEY