Aldous Huxley
As late as the seventeenth century, monarchs owned so little furniture that they had to travel from palace to palace with wagon-loads of plate and bedspreads, of carpets and tapestries.Collection: Littles
There are few who would not rather be taken in adultery than in provocation.Collection: Marriage
The goal in life is to discover that you’ve always been where you were supposed to be.Collection: Goal
The more you know, the more you seeCollection: Conversations With God
Medical science is making such remarkable progress that soon none of us will be well.Collection: Medicine
Liberties are not given, they are taken.Collection: Freedom
which is better - to be born stupid into an intelligent society or intelligent into an insane one?Collection: Stupid
The people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they're the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.Collection: Lying
Addiction is an increasing desire for an act that gives less and less satisfactionCollection: Giving
Man is hypnotized by the glitter of his own gadgetryCollection: Men
No social stability without individual stability.Collection: Brave New World
Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.Collection: Happiness
If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.Collection: Lonely
Man is unique in organizing the mass murder of his own species.Collection: War
The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information.Collection: Light
Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.Collection: Reading
Words are good servants but bad masters.Collection: Passion
When the sun rises, it rises for everyone.Collection: Equality
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.Collection: Language Words
The pleasures of ignorance are as great, in their way, as the pleasures of knowledge.Collection: Ignorance
Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn't become king. He gets lynched.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Art
Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth.Collection: Fear Of Love
One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.Collection: Believe
Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.Collection: Civilization
Assemble a mob of men and women previously conditioned by a daily reading of the newspapers; treat them to amplified band music, bright lights...and in next to no time you can reduce them to a state of almost mindless subhumanity. Never before have so few been in a position to make fools, maniacs, or criminals of so many.Collection: Money
Every ceiling reached becomes a floor.Collection: Positive
Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.Collection: Men
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. There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Meaningful
The spiritual journey does not consist of arriving at a new destination where a person gains what he did not have, or becomes what he is not. It consists in the dissipation of one's own ignorance concerning oneself and life, and the gradual growth of that understanding which begins the spiritual awakening. The finding of God is a coming to one?s self.Collection: Spiritual
Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.Collection: People
It's a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research & study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.Collection: Inspirational
The question of the next generation will not be one of how to liberate the masses, but rather, how to make them love their servitude.Collection: Generations
Higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue.Collection: Guarantees
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. But 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.Collection: Powerful
The world is an illusion, but an illusion which we must take seriously.Collection: World
Knowledge is porportionate to being... You know in virtue of what you are.Collection: Knowledge
Some of the greatest advances in mathematics have been due to the invention of symbols, which it afterwards became necessary to explain; from the minus sign proceeded the whole theory of negative quantities.Collection: Math
I dread the inevitable acceleration of American world domination which will be the result of it all...Europe will no longer be Europe.Collection: Europe
Eating, drinking, dying - three primary manifestations of the universal and impersonal life. Animals live that impersonal and universal life without knowing its nature. Ordinary people know its nature but don't live it and, if they think seriously about it, refuse to accept it. An enlightened person knows it, lives it, and accepts it completely. He eats, he drinks, and in due course he dies - but he eats with a difference, drinks with a difference, dies with a difference.Collection: Drinking
Successfully (whatever that may mean) or unsuccessfully, we all overact the part of our favorite character in fiction.Collection: Character
Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.Collection: Book
Champagne had the taste of an apple peeled with a steel knife.Collection: Food
Hell is the incapacity to be other than the creature one finds oneself ordinarily behaving as.Collection: Hell
Half at least of all morality is negative and consists in keeping out of mischief. The lords prayer is less than 50 words long, and 6 of those words are devoted to asking god not to lead us into temptation.Collection: Prayer
Compared with that of Taoists and Far Eastern Buddhists, the Christian attitude toward Nature has been curiously insensitive and often downright domineering and violent. Taking their cue from an unfortunate remark in Genesis, Catholic moralists have regarded animals as mere things which men do right to regard for their own ends. . . .Collection: Christian
The inconveniences and horrors of the pox are perfectly well known to every one; but still the disease flourishes and spreads. Several million people were killed in a recent war and half the world ruined; but we all busily go on in courses that make another event of the same sort inevitable. Experientia docet? Experientia doesn't.Collection: War
In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.Collection: Men