Quotes from Aldous Huxley

A War Memorial was, in its very nature, a work dedicated to God. It was a token of thankfulness that the first stage in the culminating world—war had been crowned by the triumph of righteousness; it was at the same time a visibly embodied supplication that God might not long delay the Advent which alone could bring the final peace.

The optimum population,' said Mustapha Mond, 'is modelled on the iceberg-eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.

I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."

That is the secret of happiness and virtue - liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny. You can't consume much if you sit still and read books. If one is different, one is bound to be lonely. Beauty is attractive and we don't want people to be attracted by old things. We want them to like the new ones.

And that,' put in the Director sententiously, 'that is the secret of happiness and virtue—liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.

We're all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat —and the boat is perpetually sinking.

This suffocating interior of a dime-store shop was my own personal self; these gimcrack mobiles of tin and plastic were my personal contributions to the universe....What it had allowed me to perceive inside was not the Dharma-Body, in images, but my own mind; not Suchness, but a set of symbols - in other words, a homemade substitute for Suchness.

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. And, of course, whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered.

Omission and simplification help us to understand--but help us, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted.

A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.

Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.