Quotes from Huxley, Aldous

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 high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead.

Till at last the child's mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child's mind. And not the child's mind only. The adult's mind too–all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides–made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are OUR suggestions! The Director almost shouted in his triumph. Suggestions from the State.

What's the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you?

the Helmholtz of daily life who forgot and forgave, not the Helmholtz of a half-gramme holiday.

To pore over the literary shortcomings of twenty years ago, to attempt to patch a faulty work into the perfection it missed on its first execution, to spend one's middle age in trying to mend the artistic sins committed and bequeathed by that different person who was oneself in youth – all this is surely vain and futile.

The dictatorships of tomorrow will deprive men of their freedom, but will give them in exchange a happiness none the less real, as a subjective experience, for being chemically induced. The pursuit of happiness is one of the traditional rights of man; unfortunately, the achievement of happiness may turn out to be incompatible with another of man's rights — namely, liberty.

It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes—make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere, that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge.