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

More quotes by Aldous Huxley

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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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Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare, it is simply disgraceful.
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Real progress is progress in charity, all other advances being secondary thereto.
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Democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralization of power.
Aldous Huxley
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No Romeo-and-Juliet acts, no nonsense about Love with a large L, none of that popular song claptrap with its skies of blue, dreams come true, heaven with you. Just sensuality for its own sake.
Aldous Huxley
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The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything
Aldous Huxley
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he had been making an unsuccessful effort to write something about nothing in particular
Aldous Huxley
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Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
Aldous Huxley
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Knowledge is an affair of symbols and is, all too often, a hindrance to wisdom, the uncovering of the self from moment to moment
Aldous Huxley
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If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons, that would not be progress. For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure as a monster he was superb.
Aldous Huxley
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It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.
Aldous Huxley
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But the nature of the universe is such that ends can never justify means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end.
Aldous Huxley
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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.
Aldous Huxley
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The social body persists although the component cells may change.
Aldous Huxley
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Words are magical in the way they affect the minds of those who use them.
Aldous Huxley
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One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.
Aldous Huxley
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De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.
Aldous Huxley
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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.
Aldous Huxley
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This growing poverty in the midst of growing population constitutes a permanent menace to peace. And not only to peace, but also to democratic institutions and personal liberty For overpopulation is not compatible with freedom.
Aldous Huxley
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I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to work to realize his ambition. I did my best to explain. 'The first thing,' I said, 'is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. After that you merely have to write.'
Aldous Huxley