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Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.

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
Rise
Level
Levels
Words
Sunk
Language
Brutes
Often
Demons
Able
Demon
Thanks

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Facts are ventriloquist’s dummies. Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.
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The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.
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Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness it is generally the by-product of other activities.
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Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.
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To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style.
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Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.
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Love casts out fear but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth.
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The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.
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Ultimate Reality is not clearly and immediately apprehended except by those who have made themselves loving, pure in heart and poor in spirit.
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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.
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Civilization means food and literature all round. Beefsteaks and fiction magazines for all. First-class proteins for the body, fourth-class love-stories for the spirit.
Aldous Huxley
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... the greater part of the population is not very intelligent, dreads responsibility, and desires nothing better than to be told what to do. Provided the rulers do not interfere with its material comforts and its cherished beliefs, it is perfectly happy to let itself be ruled.
Aldous Huxley
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One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.
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Culture is like the sum of special knowledge that accumulates in any large united family and is the common property of all its members. When we of the great Culture Family meet, we exchange reminiscences about Grandfather Homer, and that awful old Dr. Johnson, and Aunt Sappho, and poor Johnny Keats.
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For every traveller who has any taste of his own, the only useful guidebook will be the one which he himself has written.
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We live together, we act on, and react to one another but always, and in all circumstances, we are by ourselves.
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On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.
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Sunsets and death death and therefore kisses, kisses and consequently birth and then death for yet another generation of sunset watchers.
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Only one more indispensable massacre of Capitalists or Communists or Fascists or Christians or Heretics, and there we are in the Golden Future.
Aldous Huxley
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Societies are composed of individuals and are good only insofar as they help individuals to realize their potentialities and to lead a happy and creative life.
Aldous Huxley