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.
ALDOUS HUXLEYBut today, in the world’s most powerful democracy, the politicians and the propagandists prefer to make nonsense of democratic procedures by appealing almost exclusively to the ignorance and irrationality of the electors.
More Aldous Huxley Quotes
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No social stability without individual stability.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
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 HUXLEY -
For at least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
In all activities of life, the secret of efficiency lies in an ability to combine two seemingly incompatible states: a state of maximum activity and a state of maximum relaxation.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can’t be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
The greatest triumphs of propoganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
Man is unique in organizing the mass murder of his own species.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty – his excessive freedom.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
Every ceiling reached becomes a floor.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
The pleasures of ignorance are as great, in their way, as the pleasures of knowledge.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
Which is better – to be born stupid into an intelligent society or intelligent into an insane one?
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
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.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
Addiction is an increasing desire for an act that gives less and less satisfaction
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
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.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
Don’t try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We’re all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat – and the boat is perpetually sinking.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
Round pegs in square holes tend to have dangerous thoughts about the social system and tend to infect others with their discontents.
ALDOUS HUXLEY