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Generalized intelligence and mental alertness are the most powerful enemies of dictatorship and at the same time the basic conditions of effective democracy.

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
Conditions
Generalized
Democracy
Alertness
Dictatorship
Enemy
Effective
Powerful
Enemies
Time
Basic
Mental
Intelligence

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Sixty two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. Idiots!
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Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.
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The moral peril to humanity of thoughtlessly accepting these conveniences [of materialism] (with their inherent disadvantages) as constituting a philosophy of life is now becoming apparent. For the implications of this disruptive materialism... are that human beings are nothing but bodies, animals, machines.
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The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
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It's a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research & study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.
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This really revolutionary revolution is to be achieved, not in the external world, but in the souls and flesh of human beings.
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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.
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In actual life a downward movement may sometimes be made the beginning of an ascent.
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The optimum population is modeled on the iceberg- eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.
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Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can't help making fly-traps, and men can't help making symbols. That's what the human brain is there for - the turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols.
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That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.
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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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Man's life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground.
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Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
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The brotherhood of men does not imply their equality. Families have their fools and their men of genius, their black sheep and their saints, their worldly successes and their worldly failures. A man should treat his brothers lovingly and with justice, according to the deserts of each. But the deserts of every brother are not the same.
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life is short and information endless: nobody has time for everything
Aldous Huxley
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I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.
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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.
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The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.
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Dying is almost the least spiritual of our acts, more strictly carnal even than the act of love. There are Death Agonies that are like the strainings of the Costive at stool.
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