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For particulars, as everyone knows, make for virtue and happiness generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.

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
Evil
Stamps
Everyone
Evils
Particulars
Make
Philosophers
Generalities
Philosopher
Compose
Necessary
Stamp
Virtue
Backbone
Society
Collectors
Happiness
Intellectually

More quotes by Aldous Huxley

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Everyone thinks this way at some point. The important thing is to power through and get to learning. If you really don't have the time Let Me Handle Your Analytics.
Aldous Huxley
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In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.
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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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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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The old idea that words possess magical powers is false but its falsity is the distortion of a very important truth. Words do have a magical effect - but not in the way that magicians supposed, and not on the objects they were trying to influence. Words are magical in the way they affect the minds of those who use them.
Aldous Huxley
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The vast majority of human beings are not interested in reason or satisfied with what it teaches.
Aldous Huxley
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If Men and Women took their Pleasures as noisily as the Cats, what Londoner could ever hope to sleep of nights?
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And no wonder for the new technique of subliminal projection, as it was called, was intimately associated with mass entertainment, and in the life of civilized human beings massed entertainment now plays a part comparable to that played in the Middle Ages be religion.
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Given a fair chance, human beings can govern themselves, and govern themselves better
Aldous Huxley
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Why should human females become sterile in their forties, while female crocodiles continue to lay eggs into their third century?
Aldous Huxley
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Medical science is making such remarkable progress that soon none of us will be well.
Aldous Huxley
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The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.
Aldous Huxley
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I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
Aldous Huxley
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There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.
Aldous Huxley
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The proper study of mankind is books.
Aldous Huxley
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The instinct of acquisitiveness has more perverts, I believe, than the instinct of sex. At any rate, people seem to me odder about money than about even their amours.
Aldous Huxley
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Well... ...That's what you always forget, isn't it? I mean, you forget to pay attention to what's happening. And that's the same as not being here and now.
Aldous Huxley
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The Humanity of men and women is inversely proportional to their Numbers. A Crowd is no more human than an Avalanche or a Whirlwind. A rabble of men and women stands lower in the scale of moral and intellectual being than a herd of Swine or of Jackals.
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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[...] Technology has tended to devaluate the traditional vision-inducing materials. The illumination of a city, for example, was once a rare event, reserved for victories and national holidays, for the canonization of saints and the crowning of kings. Now it occurs nightly and celebrates the virtues of gin, cigarettes and toothpaste.
Aldous Huxley