Quotes by

Aldous Huxley

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own. – Aldous Huxley

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead. – Aldous Huxley

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable. – Aldous Huxley

That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent. – Aldous Huxley

The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love – almost as violent and much more mischievous. – Aldous Huxley

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself. – Aldous Huxley

Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision. – Aldous Huxley

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

Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history. – Aldous Huxley

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history. – Aldous Huxley

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects… totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations. – Aldous Huxley

Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay. – Aldous Huxley

Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work. – Aldous Huxley

Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying. – Aldous Huxley

Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength. – Aldous Huxley

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty – his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure. – Aldous Huxley

The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy their second worst enemy is total efficiency. – Aldous Huxley

From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn. – Aldous Huxley

Experience teaches only the teachable. – Aldous Huxley

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