Quotes from Aldous Huxley

True, Clara's eyebrows didn't meet. But she was really too pneumatic. Whereas Fifi and Joanna were absolutely right. Plump, blonde, not too large...And it was that great lout, Tom Kawaguchi, who now took the seat between them.

By remembering what history is—the record of what human beings have been impelled to do by their ignorance and the enormous bumptiousness that makes them canonize their ignorance as a political or religious dogma.

But, then, you were born a pagan; I am trying laboriously to make myself one. I can take nothing for granted, I can enjoy nothing as it comes along. Beauty, pleasure, art, women - I have to invent an excuse, a justification for everything that's delightful. Otherwise I can't enjoy it with an easy conscience.

good she had been. Not nice, not merely molto simpatico – how charmingly and effectively these foreign tags assist one in calling a spade by some other name! – but good. You felt the active radiance of her goodness when you were near her…. And that feeling, was that less real and valid than two plus two?

One of the causes, by the way, of the apparent lack, at the present time, of great men lies in the poverty of the contemporary male coiffure. Rich in whiskers, beards, and leonine manes, the great Victorians never failed to look the part, nowadays it is impossible to know a great man when you see one.

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.

They passed a bed of opium poppies, dispetaled now; the round, ripe seedheads were brown and dry - like Polynesian trophies, Denis thought; severed heads stuck on poles.

For the good that I would,'" he quoted, "'I do not; and the evil that I would not, that I do.'" "Who said that?" "The man who invented Christianity—St. Paul.

Quote of the day:Quote of the day: A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy. Aldous Huxley

The politics of those whose goal is beyond time are always pacific; it is the idolaters of past and future, of reactionary memory and Utopian dream, who do the persecuting and make the wars. Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, 1945

The scientific dictator of tomorrow will set up his whispering machines and subliminal projectors in schools and hospitals (children and the sick are highly suggestible), and in all public places where audiences can be given a preliminary softening up by suggestibility-increasing oratory or rituals.

He woke once more to external reality, looked round him, knew what he saw- knew it, with a sinking sense of horror and disgust, for the recurrent delirium of his days and nights, the nightmare of swarming indistinguishable sameness.

It is not who is right, but what is right, that is of importance.

Did you ever feel," he asked, "as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out?

To change a vocabulary is easy; to change external circumstances or our own ingrained habits is hard and tiresome.

Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness. Mass production demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't.

It is finished. Old Mitsima's words repeated themselves in his mind. Finished, finished....In silence and from a long way off, but violently. desperately, hopelessly, he had loved Kiakimé. And now it was finished. He was sixteen.

The strange words rolled through his mind; rumbled, like talking thunder; like the drums at the summer dances, if the drums could have spoken; like the men singing the Corn Song, beautiful, beautiful, so that you cried.

I perceive that marble conceals a multitude of sins.

Man's highly developed color sense is a biological luxury—inestimably precious to him as an intellectual and spiritual being, but unnecessary to his survival as an animal.

Now it occurs nightly and celebrates the virtues of gin, cigarettes, and toothpaste.

Outside, in the garden, it was playtime. Naked in the warm June sunshine, six or seven hundred little boys and girls were running with shrill yells over the lawns, or playing ball games, or squatting silently in twos and threes among the flowering shrubs. The roses were in bloom, two nightingales soliloquized in the boscage, a cuckoo was just going out of tune among the lime trees. The air was drowsy with the murmur of bees and helicopters.

It isn't only art that's incompatible with happiness; it's also science. Science is dangerous; we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.

Outside, in the garden, it was playtime. Naked in the warm June sunshine, six or seven hundred little boys and girls were running with shrill yells over the lawns, or playing ball games, or squatting silently in twos and threes among the flowering shrubs. The roses were in bloom, two nightingales soliloquized in the boskage, a cuckoo was just going out of tune among the lime trees. The air was drowsy with the murmur of bees and helicopters.