Quotes from Aldous Huxley

But how practical, how eminently realistic! said Mr. Scogan. In this farm we have a model of sound paternal government. Make them breed, make them work, and when they're past working or breeding or begetting, slaughter them. Farming seems to be mostly indecency and cruelty, said Anne.

We make an idol of truth itself; for truth apart from charity is not God, but his image and idol, which we must neither love nor worship. Pascal

It is a scene of Satyrs and Nymphs, of pursuits and captures, provocative resistances followed by the enthusiastic surrender of lips to bearded lips, of panting bosoms to the impatience of rough hands, the whole accompanied by a babel of shouting, squealing and shrill laughter

God, they will insist, is a spirit and is to be worshipped in spirit. Therefore an experience which is chemically conditioned cannot be an experience of the divine. But, in one way or another, all our experiences are chemically conditioned, and if we imagine that some of them are purely 'spiritual', purely 'intellectual', purely 'aesthetic', it is merely because we have never troubled to investigate the internal chemical environment at the moment of their occurrence.

Did you ever feel as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out? Some sort of extra power that you aren't using-you know, like all the water that goes down the falls instead of through the turbines?

And, anyhow, hadn't you better wait till you actually see the new world?

That's to say, he's being sent to a place where he'll meet the most interesting set of men and women to be found anywhere in the world. All the people who, for one reason or another, have got too self-consciously individual to fit into community-life. All the people who aren't satisfied with orthodoxy, who've got independent ideas of their own. Every one, in a word, who's any one. I almost envy you, Mr. Watson.

It is human variability -- the fact that one man's meat is is another man's poison -- that imposes on us the duty of preserving individual liberty and of encouraging tolerance, of preventing majorities from repressing minorities, of permitting people to have a certain measure of self-determination in their lives.

There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.

Aldous Huxley absolutely detested mass culture and popular entertainment, and many of his toughest critical essays, as well as several intense passages in his fiction, consist of sneers and jeers at the cheapness of the cinematic ethic and the vulgarity of commercial music.

If one's different, one's bound to be lonely. They're beastly to one.

Happiness is a hard master- particularly other people's happiness. A much harder master, if one isn't conditioned to accept it unquestioningly, than truth.