At this point we find ourselves confronted by a very disquieting question: Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge?
ALDOUS HUXLEYGreat 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.
More Aldous Huxley Quotes
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The world is an illusion, but an illusion which we must take seriously.
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 -
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
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 -
To 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.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in substituting diabolical abstractions for human beings. Similarly, those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
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.
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 -
It isn’t a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind.
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 -
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
We shall be permitted to live on this planet only for as long as we treat all nature with compassion and intelligence.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
The older dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles, and mysteries. Under a scientific dictatorship, education will really work’ with the result that most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.
ALDOUS HUXLEY