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Aldous Huxley quotes

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“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against...” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“You can't have a lasting civilization without plenty of pleasant vices.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“A man can smile and smile and be a villain.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“Happiness is a hard master—particularly other people's happiness.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.” Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow
“A love of nature keeps no factories busy.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“No civilization without social stability. No social stability without individual stability.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“You can't learn a science unless you know what it's all about.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“There was something called democracy. As though men were more than physico-chemically equal.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“Ending is better than mending” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“I'd rather be myself . . . Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly—they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“Moral education, which ought never, in any circumstances, to be rational.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't. And, of course, whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“But 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 the high art.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons—that's philosophy.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“Pain was a fascinating horror.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“When people are suspicious with you, you start being suspicious with them.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“I want to know what passion is . . . I want to feel something strongly.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“They had not yet learned to draw the significant but often very fine distinction between smut and pure science.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“All crosses had their tops cut and became T's. There was also a thing called God.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“I ate civilization. . . . It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then . . . I ate my own wickedness.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability. That's another reason why we're so chary of applying new inventions.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can't consume much if you sit still and read books.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“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.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“Never put off till to-morrow the fun you can have to-day” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“What's the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you?” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“Christianity without tears—that's what soma is.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“Yes, we inevitably turn to God; for this religious sentiment is of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other losses.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“We condition the masses to hate the country . . . But simultaneously we condition them to love all country sports. At the same time, we see to it that all country sports shall entail the use of elaborate apparatus. So that they consume...” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“it is natural to believe in God when you're alone—quite alone, in the night, thinking about death...” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“Fine to think we can go on being socially useful even after we're dead. Making plants grow.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“the Controllers realized that force was no good. The slower but infinitely surer methods of ectogenesis, neo-Pavlovian conditioning and hypnopædia…” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“Those who feel themselves despised do well to look despising.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

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religion science happiness learning violence conditioning nature God belief society art vice loneliness truth self reading stability passion beauty leadership

Related sources

Brave New World (42)
Crome Yellow (1)