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

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Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.
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And what strange voices they have! Sometimes like the complaining of small children sometimes like the noise of lambs.
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Craving for power is not a vice of the body, consequently it knows none of the limitations imposed by a tired or satiated physiology upon gluttony, intemperance and lust
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Suppose it were perfectly certain that the life and fortune of each of us would some day depend upon our winning or losing a game of chess. Do you not think that we should all consider it to be our primary duty to learn at least the names of the pieces and how to position them on the chessboard?
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After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
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I have spoken so far only of the blissful visionary experience? But visionary experience is not always blissful. It's sometimes terrible. There is hell as well as heaven.
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The best way to find things out is not to ask questions at all. If you fire off a question, it is like firing off a gun - bang it goes
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I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
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Dictators can always consolidate their tyranny by an appeal to patriotism.
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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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The critics don't interest me because they're concerned with what's past and done, while I'm concerned with what comes next.
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...we were back at home, and I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as 'being in one's right mind.
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Every significant artist is a metaphysician, a propounder of beauty-truths and form-theories.
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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.
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Man must learn to simplify, but not to the point of falsification.
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The rush to books and universities is like the rush to the public house. People want to drown their realization of the difficulties of living properly in this grotesque contemporary world, they want to forget their own deplorable inefficiency as artists in life.
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Most vices demand considerable self-sacrifices. There is no greater mistake than to suppose that a vicious life is a life of uninterrupted pleasure. It is a life almost as wearisome and painful -- if strenuously led -- as Christian's in The Pilgrim's Progress.
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A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.
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Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.
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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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