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Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.

Aldous Huxley

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Aldous Huxley
Age: 69 †
Born: 1894
Born: July 26
Died: 1963
Died: November 22
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
Professor
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Godalming
Surrey
Aldous Leonard Huxley
Nothing
Intolerable
Men
Realism
Cynical
Excuse
Intelligence
Intelligent
Situation
Best

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At their first appearance innovators have always been derided as fools and mad men.
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No social stability without individual stability.
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Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can't help making fly-traps, and men can't help making symbols. That's what the human brain is there for - the turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols.
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Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning.
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Children are nowhere taught, in any systematic way, to distinguish true from false, or meaningful from meaningless, statements. Why is this so? Because their elders, even in the democratic countries, do not want them to be given this kind of education.
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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.
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An ideal is merely the projection, on an enormously enlarged scale, of some aspect of personality.
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A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
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Consider the problem of over-population. Rapidly mounting human numbers are pressing ever more heavily on natural resources. What is to be done?... The annual increase of numbers should be reduced. But how? We are given two choices -- famine, pestilence and war on the one hand, birth control on the other. Most of us choose birth control.
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We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
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The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
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Every gain made by individuals or societies is almost instantly taken for granted. The luminous ceiling toward which we raise our longing eyes becomes, when we have climbed to the next floor, a stretch of disregarded linoleum beneath our feet.
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Words play an enormous part in our lives and are therefore deserving of the closest study.
Aldous Huxley
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In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.
Aldous Huxley
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Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.
Aldous Huxley
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Knowledge is an affair of symbols and is, all too often, a hindrance to wisdom, the uncovering of the self from moment to moment
Aldous Huxley
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Experience is not what happens to you it's what you do with what happens to you.
Aldous Huxley
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Jehovah, Allah, the Trinity, Jesus, Buddha, are names for a great variety of human virtues, human mystical experiences, human remorses, human compensatory fantasies, human terrors, human cruelties. If all men were alike, all the world would worship the same God.
Aldous Huxley
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he had been making an unsuccessful effort to write something about nothing in particular
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Every ceiling, when reached, becomes a floor, upon which one walks as a matter of course and prescriptive right
Aldous Huxley