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One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.

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
Able
Nation
Cheating
Person
Worst
Patriot
Vicariously
Great
Feeling
Cheat
Attractions
Literature
Patriotic
Fulfills
Nations
Patriotism
Scoundrels
Wish
Virtuous
Profoundly
Feelings
Wishes
Bully
Persons
Attraction
Nationalism

More quotes by Aldous Huxley

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The goal in life is to discover that you’ve always been where you were supposed to be.
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Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.
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Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.
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Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.
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I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation - the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.
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Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time the Gray Life.
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Suddenly to realise that one is sitting, damned, among the other damned--it is a most disquieting experience so disquieting thatmost of us react to it by immediately plunging more deeply into our particular damnation in the hope, generally realized, that we may be able, at least for a time, to stifle our revolutionary knowledge.
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Compared with that of Taoists and Far Eastern Buddhists, the Christian attitude toward Nature has been curiously insensitive and often downright domineering and violent. Taking their cue from an unfortunate remark in Genesis, Catholic moralists have regarded animals as mere things which men do right to regard for their own ends. . . .
Aldous Huxley
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If you want to write, keep cats.
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Experience is not what happens to a man it is what a man does with what happens to him. It is a gift for dealing with the accidents of existence, not the accidents themselves.
Aldous Huxley
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Asceticism, it is evident, has a double motivation. If men and women torment their bodies, it is not only because they hope in this way to atone for past sins and avoid future punishments it is also because they long to visit the mind's antipodes and do some visionary sightseeing.
Aldous Huxley
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Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.
Aldous Huxley
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To talk about religion except in terms of human psychology is an irrelevance.
Aldous Huxley
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Proportion ... You can't help thinking about it in these London streets, where it doesn't exist ... It's like listening to a symphony of cats to walk along them. Senseless discords and a horrible disorder all the way ... We need no barbarians from outside they're on the premises, all the time.
Aldous Huxley
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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
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We tend to think and feel in terms of the art we like and if the art we like is bad then our thinking and feeling will be bad. And if the thinking and feeling of most of the individuals composing a society is bad, is not that society in danger?
Aldous Huxley
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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
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Reality cannot be ignored except at a price and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and more terrible becomes the price that must be paid.
Aldous Huxley
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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.
Aldous Huxley
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Christianity accepted as given a metaphysical system derived from several already existing and mutually incompatible systems.
Aldous Huxley