Aldous Huxley - Brave New World (1932)

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Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.

Aldous Huxley
The indispensible is not necessarily the desirable.

Aldous Huxley
In a few years, no doubt, marriage licences will be sold like dog licences, good for 12 months.

Aldous Huxley
Societies are composed of individuals and are good only insofar as they help individuals to realize their potentialities and to lead a happy and creative life.

Aldous Huxley
Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.

Aldous Huxley
And so, resisting the temptation to wallow in artistic remorse, I prefer to leave both well and ill alone and to think about something else

Aldous Huxley
Knowledge is the highest good, truth the supreme value, all the rest is secondary and subordinate.

Aldous Huxley
This really revolutionary revolution is to be achieved, not in the external world, but in the souls and flesh of human beings.

Aldous Huxley
And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past, you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears-that's what soma is.

Aldous Huxley
And no wonder; for the new technique of "subliminal projection," as it was called, was intimately associated with mass entertainment, and in the life of civilized human beings massed entertainment now plays a part comparable to that played in the Middle Ages be religion.

Aldous Huxley
The social body persists although the component cells may change.

Aldous Huxley
Science is dangerous; we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.

Aldous Huxley
Solved by standard Gammas, unvarying Deltas, uniform Epsilons. Millions of identical twins. The principle of mass production at last applied to biology.

Aldous Huxley
Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes.... it was essential that they should keep on going to the country, even though they hated it.

Aldous Huxley
Higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue.

Aldous Huxley
The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray. It is better that one should suffer than that many be corrupted.

Aldous Huxley
Industrial civilization is only possible when there's no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning.

Aldous Huxley
Well, I'd rather be unhappy than have the sort of false, lying happiness you were having here.

Aldous Huxley
The effectiveness of political and religious propaganda depends upon the methods employed, not upon the doctrines taught. These doctrines may be true or false, wholesome or pernicious—it makes little or no difference.

Aldous Huxley
Unless we choose to decentralize and to use applied science, not as the end to which human beings are to be made the means, but as the means to producing a race of free individuals, we have only two alternatives to choose from: either a number of national

Aldous Huxley
People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.

Aldous Huxley
Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.

Aldous Huxley
Most kings and priests have been despotic, and all religions have been riddled with superstition.

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 wrong-doing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

Aldous Huxley
You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases.

Aldous Huxley
Of course some sort of general idea they must have, if they were to do their work intelligently — though as little of one as possible. For particulars, as every one knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.

Aldous Huxley
"But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art.

Aldous Huxley
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, said Jefferson, it expects what never was and never will be.

Aldous Huxley
The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information.

Aldous Huxley
The optimum population is modeled on the iceberg — eight ninths below the water line, one ninth above.

Aldous Huxley