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If humans were in fact the members of a truly social species, and if their individual differences were trifling and could be completely ironed out by appropriate conditioning, then, obviously, there would be no need for liberty and the State would be justified in persecuting the heretics who demanded it.

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
Needs
State
Appropriate
Persecuting
Would
Fact
Obviously
Ironed
Individual
Species
Heretics
Social
Members
Trifling
Facts
Completely
Heretic
States
Truly
Demanded
Humans
Differences
Conditioning
Need
Liberty
Justified

More quotes by Aldous Huxley

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For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.
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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.
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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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Love is as necessary to human beings as food and shelter [but] without intelligence, ... love is impotent and freedom unattainable.
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One seventh of your life is spent on Monday.
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The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.
Aldous Huxley
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Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.
Aldous Huxley
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Everyone thinks this way at some point. The important thing is to power through and get to learning. If you really don't have the time Let Me Handle Your Analytics.
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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
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Every gain made by individuals or societies is almost instantly taken for granted. The luminous ceiling toward which we raise our longing eyes becomes, when we have climbed to the next floor, a stretch of disregarded linoleum beneath our feet.
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Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.
Aldous Huxley
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For the born traveller, travelling is a besetting vice. Like other vices, it is imperious, demanding its victim's time, money, energy and the sacrifice of comfort.
Aldous Huxley
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For some strange reason murder has always seemed more respectable than fornication. Few people are shocked when they hear God described as the God of Battles but what an outcry there would be if anyone spoke of him as the God of Brothels.
Aldous Huxley
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Assemble a mob of men and women previously conditioned by a daily reading of the newspapers treat them to amplified band music, bright lights...and in next to no time you can reduce them to a state of almost mindless subhumanity. Never before have so few been in a position to make fools, maniacs, or criminals of so many.
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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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
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Every man's memory is his private literature.
Aldous Huxley
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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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We now spend a good deal more on drink and smoke than we spend on education. This, of course, is not surprising. The urge to escape from selfhood and the environment is in almost everyone almost all the time.
Aldous Huxley
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Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.
Aldous Huxley