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All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in substituting diabolical abstractions for human beings. Similarly, those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder.

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
Vocabulary
Substituting
Mass
Invented
Abstractions
Beings
Propaganda
Diabolical
Lasts
Consists
Similarly
Last
Defend
Sounding
Process
Describe
Resort
War
Pleasant
Resorts
Human
Abstraction
Humans
Murder

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Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.
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Now, a corpse, poor thing, is an untouchable and the process of decay is, of all pieces of bad manners, the vulgarest imaginable. For a corpse is, by definition, a person absolutely devoid of savoir vivre.
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Thought of the incomprehensible sequence of changes and chances that make up a life, all the beauties and horrors and absurdities whose conjunctions create the uninterpretable and yet divinely significant pattern of human destiny.
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Perhaps dirt is the necessary condition of beauty.... Perhaps hygiene and art can never be bedfellows. No Verdi, after all, without spitting into trumpets. No Duse without a crowd of malodorous bourgeois giving one another their coryzas. And think of the inexpugnable retreats for microbes prepared by Michelangelo in the curls of Moses' beard!
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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.
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Every ceiling reached becomes a floor.
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The condition of being forgiven is self-abandonment. The proud man prefers self-reproach, however painful --because the reproached self isn't abandoned it remains intact.
Aldous Huxley
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Half at least of all morality is negative and consists in keeping out of mischief. The lords prayer is less than 50 words long, and 6 of those words are devoted to asking god not to lead us into temptation.
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Intellectuals ... regard over-simplification as the original sin of the mind and have no use for the slogans, the unqualified assertions and sweeping generalizations.
Aldous Huxley
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There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that is your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you have worked on your own corner.
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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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Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe.
Aldous Huxley
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Happiness is like coke — something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else.
Aldous Huxley
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There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.
Aldous Huxley
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Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
Aldous Huxley
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Love is as necessary to human beings as food and shelter [but] without intelligence, ... love is impotent and freedom unattainable.
Aldous Huxley
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Champagne had the taste of an apple peeled with a steel knife.
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I dread the inevitable acceleration of American world domination which will be the result of it all...Europe will no longer be Europe.
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At any given moment, life is completely senseless. But viewed over a period, it seems to reveal itself as an organism existing in time, having a purpose, trending in a certain direction.
Aldous Huxley
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If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is keep a pair of cats.
Aldous Huxley