Quotes from Aldous Huxley

Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you'd collapse. And while you people are overconsuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.

A love of nature keeps no factories busy.

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.

It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'Try to be a little kinder.

To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.

I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.

Ending is better than mending.

Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are printed on the outside of boxes of breakfast cereals. On anything.

It is natural to believe in God when you're alone-- quite alone, in the night, thinking about death.

It isn't a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past.

There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.

I want God, I want poetry, I want danger, I want freedom, I want sin.

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.

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.

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.

We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Liberties aren't given, they are taken.

A man can smile and smile and be a villain.

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.

The leech's kiss, the squid's embrace, The prurient ape's defiling touch: And do you like the human race? No, not much.

Did you eat something that didn't agree with you? asked Bernard. The Savage nodded. I ate civilization.

It is only when we have renounced our preoccupation with I, me, mine, that we can truly possess the world in which we live. Everything, provided that we regard nothing as property. And not only is everything ours; it is also everybody else's.