Aldous Huxley Quotes

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If only people would realize that moral principles are like measles.... They have to be caught. And only the people who've got them can pass on the contagion.

Aldous Huxley
War is often described as a law of nature-this is not true: Among the lower animals, war is unknown.

Aldous Huxley
Applied Science is a conjuror, whose bottomless hat yields impartially the softest of Angora rabbits and the most petrifying of Medusas.

Aldous Huxley
Science in itself is morally neutral; it becomes good or evil according as it is applied.

Aldous Huxley
How orderly philosophical is the landscape, are all the inhabitants of this World! It is the creation of a god who "ever plays the geometer."

Aldous Huxley
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.

Aldous Huxley
Religion is always a patron of the arts, but its taste is by no means impeccable.

Aldous Huxley
Except under controlled conditions, or in circumstances where it is possible to ignore individuals and consider only large numbers and the law of averages, any kind of accurate foresight is impossible.

Aldous Huxley
The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.

Aldous Huxley
A competent portraitist knows how to imply the profile in the full face.

Aldous Huxley
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.

Aldous Huxley
Proportion... You can't help thinking about it in these London streets, where it doesn't exist... It's like listening to a symphony of cats to walk along them. Senseless discords and a horrible disorder all the way... We need no barbarians from outside; they're on the premises, all the time.

Aldous Huxley
Unlike art, science is genuinely progressive. Achievement in the fields of research and technology is cumulative; each generation begins at the point where its predecessor left off.

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
To associate with other like-minded people in small, purposeful groups is for the great majority of men and women a source of profound psychological satisfaction. Exclusiveness will add to the pleasure of being several, but at one; and secrecy will intensify it almost to ecstasy.

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
Chaos and ineptitude are anti-human; but so too is a superlatively efficient government, equipped with all the products of a highly developed technology.

Aldous Huxley
A world where beauty and logic, painting and analytic geometry, had become one.

Aldous Huxley
Most ignorances are vincible, and in the greater number of cases stupidity is what the Buddha pronounced it to be, a sin. For, consciously, or subconsciously, it is with deliberation that we do not know or fail to understand-because incomprehension allows us, with a good conscience, to evade unpleasant obligations and responsibilities, because ignorance is the best excuse for going on doing what one likes, but ought not, to do.

Aldous Huxley
Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment.... The world, you must remember, is only just becoming literate. As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.

Aldous Huxley
Pageantry is a visionary art which has been used, from time immemorial, as a political instrument.

Aldous Huxley
Real orgies are never so exciting as pornographic books. In a volume by Pierre Louys all the girls are young and their figures perfect; there's no hiccoughing or bad breath, no fatigue or boredom, no sudden recollections of unpaid bills or business letters unanswered, to interrupt the raptures. Art gives you the sensation, the thought, the feeling quite pure--chemically pure, I mean,... not morally.

Aldous Huxley
Art is one of the means whereby man seeks to redeem a life which is experienced as chaotic, senseless, and largely evil.

Aldous Huxley
Fertilize and bokanovskify — in other words, multiply by seventy-two — and you get an average of nearly eleven thousand brothers and sisters in a hundred and fifty two batches of identical twins, all within two years of the same age.

Aldous Huxley
The demon of calculation possesses the mind.

Aldous Huxley
The natural rhythm of human life is routine punctuated by orgies.

Aldous Huxley
If Men and Women took their Pleasures as noisily as the Cats, what Londoner could ever hope to sleep of nights?

Aldous Huxley
We are so anxious to achieve some particular end that we never pay attention to the psycho-physical means whereby that end is to be gained. So far as we are concerned, any old means is good enough. But the nature of the universe is such that ends can never justify the means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end.

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
"Give them a few figures, Mr. Foster," said the Director, who was tired of talking.

Aldous Huxley