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

More quotes by Aldous Huxley

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One right-thinking man thinks like all other right-thinking men of his time that is to say, in most cases, like some wrong-thinking man of another time.
Aldous Huxley
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The only consistent people are the dead
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We are so anxious to achieve some particular end that we never pay attention to the psycho-physical means whereby that end is to be gained. So far as we are concerned, any old means is good enough. But the nature of the universe is such that ends can never justify the means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end.
Aldous Huxley
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I'm pretty good at inventing phrases - you know, the sort of words that suddenly make you jump, almost as though you'd sat on a pin, they seem so new and exciting even though they're about something hypnopaedically* obvious. But that doesn't seem enough. It's not enough for the phrases to be good what you make with them ought to be good too.
Aldous Huxley
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Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness, a narrow channelling of impulse and energy.
Aldous Huxley
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The present moment is the only aperture through which the soul can pass out of time into eternity, through which grace can pass out of eternity into the soul, and through which love can pass from one soul in time to another soul in time.
Aldous Huxley
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A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.
Aldous Huxley
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he had been making an unsuccessful effort to write something about nothing in particular
Aldous Huxley
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That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
Aldous Huxley
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For some strange reason murder has always seemed more respectable than fornication. Few people are shocked when they hear God described as the God of Battles but what an outcry there would be if anyone spoke of him as the God of Brothels.
Aldous Huxley
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Ignore death up to the last moment then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?
Aldous Huxley
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Consciousness is only possible through change change is only possible through movement.
Aldous Huxley
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If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons, that would not be progress. For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure as a monster he was superb.
Aldous Huxley
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A man may have strong humanitarian and democratic principles, but if he happens to have been brought up as a bath-taking, shirt-changing lover of fresh air, he will have to overcome certain physical repugnance before he can bring himself to put those principles into practice.
Aldous Huxley
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Nonsense is an assertion of man's spiritual freedom in spite of all the oppressions of circumstance.
Aldous Huxley
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I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise.
Aldous Huxley
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Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.
Aldous Huxley
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Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are printed on the outside of boxes of breakfast cereals. On anything.
Aldous Huxley
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Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory - all these have served, in H. G. Wells's phrase, as Doors in the Wall.
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