Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Aldous Huxley

Image
In life, man proposes, God disposes.
Aldous Huxley
Image
The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.
Aldous Huxley
Image
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!
Aldous Huxley
Image
Did you ever feel, as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out? Some sort of extra power that you aren't using - you know, like all the water that goes down the falls instead of through the turbines?
Aldous Huxley
Image
Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.
Aldous Huxley
Image
If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay - in solid cash - the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.
Aldous Huxley
Image
In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.
Aldous Huxley
Image
The lunatic fringe is more like a Spanish shawl, where the fringe makes up the entire garment.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Lying in bed, he would think of Heaven and London.
Aldous Huxley
Image
If only people would realize that moral principles are like measles.... They have to be caught. And only the people who've got them can pass on the contagion.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Of the significant and pleasurable experiences of life only the simplest are open indiscriminately to all. The rest cannot be had except by those who have undergone a suitable training.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Some of the greatest advances in mathematics have been due to the invention of symbols, which it afterwards became necessary to explain from the minus sign proceeded the whole theory of negative quantities.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Industrialization is the systemic exploitation of wasting assets. In all too many cases, the thing we call progress is merely an acceleration in the rate of that exploitation.
Aldous Huxley
Image
One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons-that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.
Aldous Huxley
Image
The artists who the world has always recognized as the greatest are those with the widest sympathy. The greatness of the great artist depends precisely on the width and the intensity of his sympathy.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.
Aldous Huxley
Image
De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.
Aldous Huxley
Image
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.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Consider the problem of over-population. Rapidly mounting human numbers are pressing ever more heavily on natural resources. What is to be done?... The annual increase of numbers should be reduced. But how? We are given two choices -- famine, pestilence and war on the one hand, birth control on the other. Most of us choose birth control.
Aldous Huxley