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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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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
Women
Humble
Flourish
Still
Artists
Entertain
Wanted
General
Machinery
Believe
Days
Compelled
Way
Difficult
Permit
Men
Culture
Aids
Amuse
Artist
Atmosphere
Passivity
Stills
Artistic
Professionals

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A life-worshipper's philosophy is comprehensive. He is at one moment a positivist and at another a mystic: now haunted by the thought of death and now a Dionysian child of nature now a pessimist and now, with a change of lover or liver or even the weather, an exuberant believer that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world.
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The traveller's-eye view of men and women is not satisfying. A man might spend his life in trains and restaurants and know nothing of humanity at the end. To know, one must be an actor as well as a spectator.
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If you want to write, keep cats.
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How difficult it is to sound persuasive at the top of one's voice!
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Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
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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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Science in itself is morally neutral it becomes good or evil according as it is applied.
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Two hours. One hundred and twenty minutes. Anything might be done in that time. Anything. Nothing. Oh, he had had hundreds of hours, and what had he done with them? Wasted them, spilt the precious minutes as though his reservoir were inexhaustible.
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I think that fiction and, as I say, history and biography are immensely important, not only for their own sake, because they provide a picture of life now and of life in the past, but also as vehicles for the expression of general philosophic ideas, religious ideas, social ideas.
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A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.
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All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny.
Aldous Huxley
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Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.
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Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unshown marble of great sculpture. The silent bear no witness against themselves.
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The instinct of acquisitiveness has more perverts, I believe, than the instinct of sex. At any rate, people seem to me odder about money than about even their amours.
Aldous Huxley
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Happiness is like coke — something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else.
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Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
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People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
Aldous Huxley
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We lie to ourselves in order that we may still have the excuse of ignorance, the alibi of stupidity and incomprehension, possessing which we can continue with a good conscience to commit and tolerate the most monstrous crimes.
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A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State's motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.
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You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
Aldous Huxley