Quotes from Aldous Huxley

the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man's Final End?

There was something called Christianity.

De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.

I took my [mescaline] pill at eleven ... I spent several minutes – or was it several centuries? – not merely gazing at those bamboo legs, but actually being them – or rather being myself in them; or, to be still more accurate (for I was not involved in the case, nor in a certain sense were they) being my Not-self in the Not-self which was the chair.

It's an absurdity. An Alpha-decanted, Alpha-conditioned man would go mad if he had to do Epsilon Semi-moron work - go mad, or start smashing things up.

But God doesn't change.' 'Men do, though.' 'What difference does that make?' 'All the difference in the world.

So the journey is over and I am back again where I started, richer by much experience and poorer by many exploded convictions, many perished certainties. For convictions and certainties are too often the concomitants of ignorance. Those who like to feel that they are always right and who attach a high importance to their own opinions should stay at home. When one is traveling, convictions are mislaid as easily as spectacles; but unlike spectacles, they are not easily replaced.

Lenina was left to face the horrors of Malpais unaided. They came crowding in on her thick and fast. The spectacle of two young women giving the breast to their babies made her blush and turn away her face.

I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.

There's nothing like a re-creation of the event. Which is lucky. Think if one could fully remember perfume or kisses! How wearisome the reality of them would be!

Bernard gave his orders in the sharp, rather arrogant and even offensive tone of one who does not feel himself too secure in his superiority.

Liberation from prevailing conventions of thought, feeling and behaviour is accomplished most effectively by the practice of disinterested virtues and through direct insight into the real nature of ultimate reality. (Such insight is a gift, inherent in the individual; but, though inherent, it can not manifest itself completely except where certain conditions are fulfilled. The principle pre-condition of insight is, precisely, the practice of disinterested virtues.)

We haven't any use for old things here." "Even when they're beautiful?" "Particularly when they're beautiful. Beauty's attractive, and we don't want people to be attracted by old things. We want them to like the new ones." "But the new ones are so stupid and horrible.

Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons—that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.

Whatever is he saying? said a voice, very near, distinct and shrill through the warblings of the Super-Wurlitzer. The Savage violently started and, uncovering his face, looked round. Five khaki twins, each with the stump of a long eclair in his right hand, and their identical faces variously smeared with liquid chocolate, were standing in a row, puggily goggling at him. They met his eyes and simultaneously grinned. One of them pointed with his eclair butt. Is she dead?he asked.

Un estado totalitario realmente eficaz sería aquel en el cual los jefes políticos todopoderosos y su ejército de colaboradores pudieran gobernar una población de esclavos sobre los cuales no fuese necesario ejercer coerción alguna por cuanto amarían su servidumbre. Inducirles a amarla es la tarea asignada en los actuales estados totalitarios a los ministerios de propaganda, los directores de los periódicos y los maestros de escuela.

God is Dipa's alibi. Why can't criminals be frank about what they're up to? All this disgusting idealistic hogwash—it makes one vomit.

And so they lived unhappily ever after'.

Glad to hear what? asked Jenny, emerging suddenly from her private interior world like a cuckoo from a clock. She received an explanation, smiled, nodded, cuckooed at last I see, and popped back, clapping shut the door behind her.

Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they ahd been made for man, not as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them.

Take one sexually inept wage-slave,'" she went on, "'one dissatisfied female, two or (if preferred) three small television-addicts; marinate in a mixture of Freudism and dilute Christianity; then bottle up tightly in a four-room flat and stew for fifteen years in their own juice.

So far as they're concerned, the physical fronts don't exist. Except for a mouth and an anus, their patient doesn't have a body. He isn't an organism, he wasn't born with a constitution or a temperament. All he has is the two ends of a digestive tube, a family and a psyche.

You can't learn a science unless you know what it's all about.

Te obiÅŸnuieÅŸti ÅŸi cu asta, repet? el. Cincizeci la sut? din consol?rile filosofiei în cinci cuvinte. Iar cealalt? jum?tate poate fi exprimat? în ÅŸase: când eÅŸti mort, eÅŸti mort, frate. Sau, dac? preferi, o poÅ£i exprima în opt: nici când eÅŸti mort, frate, nu eÅŸti mort.