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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.

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
Lying
Tolerate
Order
Stupidity
Stills
Commit
Still
Excuse
Alibi
May
Conscience
Incomprehension
Good
Continue
Possessing
Ignorance
Monstrous
Crime
Crimes

More quotes by Aldous Huxley

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Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.
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The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
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Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery.
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Only times and places, only names and ghosts.
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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.
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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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Man is an amphibian who lives simultaneously in two worlds-the given and the home-made, the world of matter, life and consciousness and the world of symbols.
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Wherever we turn we find that the real obstacles to peace are human will and feeling, human convictions, prejudices, opinions. If we want to get rid of war we must get rid first of all of its psychological causes. Only when this has been done will the rulers of the nations even desire to get rid of the economic and political causes.
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Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.
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A gramme is better than a damn.
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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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War is often described as a law of nature-this is not true: Among the lower animals, war is unknown.
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Results only come to those who master the paradoxical art of doing and not doing, of letting go as a person in order that the immanent and transcendent unknown quantity may take hold. We cannot make ourselves understand the most we can do is to foster a state of mind in which understanding may come to us.
Aldous Huxley
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All that happens means something nothing you do is ever insignificant.
Aldous Huxley
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Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals it cannot be mass-produced.
Aldous Huxley
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And what strange voices they have! Sometimes like the complaining of small children sometimes like the noise of lambs.
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We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters.
Aldous Huxley
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It’s embarrassing to tell you this, but it seems to come down mostly to just learning to be kinder.
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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.
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The inconveniences and horrors of the pox are perfectly well known to every one but still the disease flourishes and spreads. Several million people were killed in a recent war and half the world ruined but we all busily go on in courses that make another event of the same sort inevitable. Experientia docet? Experientia doesn't.
Aldous Huxley