Best Aldous Huxley Quotes
1- “People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” ~ Aldous Huxley
2- “There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it.” ~ Aldous Huxley
3- “The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free.” ~ Aldous Huxley
4- “The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.” ~ Aldous Huxley
5- “Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left.” ~ Aldous Huxley
6- “Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.” ~ Aldous Huxley
7- “Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.” ~ Aldous Huxley
8- “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling.” ~ Aldous Huxley
9- “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” ~ Aldous Huxley
10- “There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.” ~ Aldous Huxley
11- “The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society.” ~ Aldous Huxley
12- “This Power Elite directly employs several millions of the country´s working force in its factories, offices and stores, controls many millions more by lending them the money to buy its products, and, through its ownership of the media of mass communication, influences the thoughts, the feelings and the actions of virtually everybody. To parody the words of W. Churchill, never have so many been manipulated so much by few.” ~ Aldous Huxley
13- “Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth.” ~ Aldous Huxley
14- “People often ask me what is the most effective technique for transforming their life. It is a little embarrassing that after years and years of research and experimentation, I have to say that the best answer is – just be a little kinder.” ~ Aldous Huxley
15- “Dictators can always consolidate their tyranny by an appeal to patriotism.” ~ Aldous Huxley
16- “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
17- “Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.” ~ Aldous Huxley
18- “The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’ — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.” ~ Aldous Huxley
19- “The question of the next generation will not be one of how to liberate the masses, but rather, how to make them love their servitude.” ~ Aldous Huxley
20- “The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.” ~ Aldous Huxley
21- “If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.” ~ Aldous Huxley
22- “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.” ~ Aldous Huxley
23- “In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies – the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” ~ Aldous Huxley
24- “Democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralization of power.” ~ Aldous Huxley
25- “A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.” ~ Aldous Huxley
26- “One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.” ~ Aldous Huxley
27- “An intellectual is a person who’s found one thing that’s more interesting than sex.” ~ Aldous Huxley
28- “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.” ~ Aldous Huxley
29- “The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.” ~ Aldous Huxley
30- “The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.” ~ Aldous Huxley
31- “Human beings act in a great variety of irrational ways, but all of them seem to be capable, if given a fair chance, of making a reasonable choice in the light of available evidence. Democratic institutions can be made to work only if all concerned do their best to impart knowledge and to encourage rationality. But today, in the world’s most powerful democracy, the politicians and the propagandists prefer to make nonsense of democratic procedures by appealing almost exclusively to the ignorance and irrationality of the electors.” ~ Aldous Huxley
32- “The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.” ~ Aldous Huxley
33- “Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.” ~ Aldous Huxley
34- “Liberties are not given, they are taken.” ~ Aldous Huxley
35- “Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence – those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.” ~ Aldous Huxley
36- “Medical science is making such remarkable progress that soon none of us will be well.” ~ Aldous Huxley
37- “Every ceiling reached becomes a floor.” ~ Aldous Huxley
38- “Hitler’s vast propaganda successes were accomplished with little more than the radio and loudspeaker, and without TV and tape and video recording . . . Today the art of mind control is in the process of becoming a science.” ~ Aldous Huxley
39- “which is better – to be born stupid into an intelligent society or intelligent into an insane one?” ~ Aldous Huxley
40- “The Bhagavad-Gita is the most systematic statement of spiritual evolution of endowing value to mankind. It is one of the most clear and comprehensive summaries of perennial philosophy ever revealed; hence its enduring value is subject not only to India but to all of humanity.” ~ Aldous Huxley
41- “Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and more terrible becomes the price that must be paid.” ~ Aldous Huxley
42- “We shall be permitted to live on this planet only for as long as we treat all nature with compassion and intelligence.” ~ Aldous Huxley
43- “Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn’t become king. He gets lynched.” ~ Aldous Huxley
44- “All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.” ~ Aldous Huxley
45- “The goal in life is to discover that you’ve always been where you were supposed to be.” ~ Aldous Huxley
46- “An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.” ~ Aldous Huxley
47- “What I may call the messages of Brave New World, but it is possible to make people contented with their servitude. I think this can be done. I think it has been done in the past. I think it could be done even more effectively now because you can provide them with bread and circuses and you can provide them with endless amounts of distractions and propaganda.” ~ Aldous Huxley
48- “Cynical realism is the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.” ~ Aldous Huxley
49- “It’s a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research & study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.” ~ Aldous Huxley
50- “Don’t try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We’re all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat – and the boat is perpetually sinking.” ~ Aldous Huxley
