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

More quotes by 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.
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Knowledge is porportionate to being... You know in virtue of what you are.
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People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
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The present moment is the only aperture through which the soul can pass out of time into eternity, through which grace can pass out of eternity into the soul, and through which love can pass from one soul in time to another soul in time.
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I ate civilization. It poisoned me I was defiled. And then, he added in a lower tone, I ate my own wickedness.
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Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, who have made up in their minds to be content with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.
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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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In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.
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Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.
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The ductless glands secrete among other things our moods, our aspirations, our philosophy of life.
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...it is not what one has experienced but what one does with what one has experienced that matters.
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Thought is barred in this City of Dreadful Joy and conversation is unknown.
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Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory - all these have served, in H. G. Wells's phrase, as Doors in the Wall.
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The nature of oratory is such that there has always been a tendency among politicians and clergymen to oversimplify complex matters. From a pulpit or a platform even the most conscientious of speakers finds it very difficult to tell the whole truth.
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Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.
Aldous Huxley
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I know very dimly when I start what's going to happen. I just have a very general idea, and then the thing develops as I write.
Aldous Huxley
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That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.
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I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation - the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.
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Every significant artist is a metaphysician, a propounder of beauty-truths and form-theories.
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Ending is better than mending.
Aldous Huxley