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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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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
Slogans
Assertion
Generalizations
Originals
Assertions
Original
Unqualified
Regard
Simplification
Sin
Generalization
Use
Intellectuals
Mind
Sweeping

More quotes by Aldous Huxley

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Where beauty is worshipped for beauty's sake as a goddess, independent of and superior to morality and philosophy, the most horrible putrefaction is apt to set in. The lives of the aesthetes are the far from edifying commentary on the religion of beauty.
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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All that is needed is money and a candidate who can be coached to look sincere. Political principles and plans for specific action have come to lose most of their importance. The personality of the candidate, the way he is projected by the advertising experts, are the things that really matter.
Aldous Huxley
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When truth is nothing but truth, it's unnatural, it's an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world.
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
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Plasticene and self-expression will not solve the problems of education. Nor will technology and vocational guidance nor the classics and the Hundred Best Books.
Aldous Huxley
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We live together, we act on, and react to, one another but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. [...] By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable.
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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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.
Aldous Huxley
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I've never discussed my writing with others much, but I don't believe it can do any harm. I don't think that there's any risk that ideas or materials will evaporate.
Aldous Huxley
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To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.
Aldous Huxley
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Addiction is an increasing desire for an act that gives less and less satisfaction
Aldous Huxley
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Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be
Aldous Huxley
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If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.
Aldous Huxley
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Can we unite against ourselves for our own higher interest?
Aldous Huxley
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A large city cannot be experientially known its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.
Aldous Huxley
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One cubic centimeter cures ten gloomy sentiments.
Aldous Huxley
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The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.
Aldous Huxley
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In the days before machinery men and women who wanted to amuse themselves were compelled, in their humble way, to be artists. Now they sit still and permit professionals to entertain them by the aid of machinery. It is difficult to believe that general artistic culture can flourish in this atmosphere of passivity.
Aldous Huxley
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I'm pretty good at inventing phrases - you know, the sort of words that suddenly make you jump, almost as though you'd sat on a pin, they seem so new and exciting even though they're about something hypnopaedically* obvious. But that doesn't seem enough. It's not enough for the phrases to be good what you make with them ought to be good too.
Aldous Huxley