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The thin and precarious crust of decency is all that separates any civilization, however impressive, from the hell of anarchy or systematic tyranny which lie in wait beneath the surface .

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
Wait
Systematic
However
Decency
Civilization
Impressive
Hell
Anarchy
Waiting
Thin
Lying
Beneath
Crust
Tyranny
Precarious
Surface
Separates

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Modern man no longer regards Nature as in any sense divine and feels perfectly free to behave toward her as an overweening conqueror and tyrant.
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People will insist on treating the mons Veneris as though it were Mount Everest. Too silly!
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One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters.
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The ductless glands secrete among other things our moods, our aspirations, our philosophy of life.
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Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.
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But then people don't read literature in order to understand they read it because they want to re-live the feelings and sensations which they found exciting in the past. Art can be a lot of things but in actual practice, most of it is merely the mental equivalent of alcohol and cantharides.
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Contemplation is that condition of alert passivity, in which the soul lays itself open to the divine Ground within and without, the immanent and transcendent Godhead.
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If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.
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The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.
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A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.
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Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.
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The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything
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Who lives longer? The man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or a man who lives on roast beef, water and potatoes 'till 95? One passes his 24 months in eternity. All the years of the beefeater are lived only in time.
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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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To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style.
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Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.
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The self is coming from a state of pure awareness from the state of being. All the rest that comes about in a outward manifesation of the physical world, including fluctuations which end up as thoughts and actions
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I'm sick. I've eaten civilisation and I'm sick.
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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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Unless we choose to decentralize and to use applied science, not as the end to which human beings are to be made the means, but as the means to producing a race of free individuals, we have only two alternatives to choose from: either a number of national
Aldous Huxley