Quotes from Aldous Huxley

I would rather,' he said, 'give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel.' (And here let me pause to make Mr. Douglas a sporting offer. I will provide a healthy boy, a phial of prussic acid, and a copy of The Well of Loneliness, and if he keeps his word and gives the boy the prussic acid I undertake to pay all expenses of his defense at the ensuing murder trial and to erect a monument to his memory after he has been hanged.)

In a world of universal deciet telling the truth is an revolutionary act

Everything that happens is intrinsically like the man it happens to.

Unmentioned, what is can become as though it were not.

It is their duty to be infantile, even against their inclination.

Grace is the first mouthful of each course - chewed and chewed until there's nothing left of it. And all the time you're chewing you pay attention to the flavour of the food, to it's consistency and temperature, to the pressures on your teeth and the feel of the muscles in your jaws.

Today I feel no wish to demonstrate that sanity is impossible. On the contrary, though I remain no less sadly certain than in the past that sanity is a rather rare phenomenon, I am convinced that it can be achieved and would like to see more of it.

In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope and movies and the radio, it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.

I think of you so incessantly, so insistently. The thought of you is always there. It lies hidden, a latency, in the most unlikely things and places, ready at the command of some chance association to jump out at me from its ambush.

But wouldn't you like to be free to be happy in some other way? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else's way.

That's one of the disadvantages of getting older; you're inclined to make intimate contacts with fewer people.

Shearwater sighed, like a whale in the night.

In 1984 the lust for power is satisfied by inflicting pain; in Brave New World, by inflicting a hardly less humiliating pleasure.

What's lemonade? Something you make out of lemons. And what's a crusade? Something you make out of crosses—a course of gratuitous violence motivated by an obsession with unanalyzed symbols.

He took nobody by surprise; there was nobody to take.

That which besets me is indifference. I can't be bothered about people. Or rather, won't. For I avoid, carefully, all occasions for being bothered... Indifference is a form of sloth, and sloth in its turn is one of the symptoms of loveless-ness. One isn't lazy about what one loves. The problem is: how to love?

It's good to be cynical, he said. That is, if you know when to stop. Most of the things that we're all taught to respect and reverence- they don't deserve anything but cynicism.

Una dictadura perfecta tendría la apariencia de una democracia,pero sería básicamente una prisión sin muros de la que los presos ni siquiera sonarían con escapar.Sería esencialmente un sistema de esclavitud,en el que gracias al consumo y el entretenimiento,los esclavos amarian su servidumbre.

Everyone works for everyone else. We can't do without anyone. Even Epsilons are useful. We couldn't do without Epsilons. Everyone works for everyone else. We can't do without anyone.

God in the safe and Ford on the shelves.

The untutored egotist merely wants what he wants. Give him a religious education, and it becomes obvious to him, it becomes axiomatic, that what he wants is what God wants, that his cause is the cause of whatever he may happen to regard as the True Church and that any compromise is a metaphysical Munich, an appeasement of Radical Evil.

Happiness is a hard master - particularly other people's happiness.

All that the conscious ego can do is to formulate wishes, which are then carried out by forces which it controls very little and understands not at all. When it does anything more - when it tries too hard, for example, when it worries, when it becomes apprehensive about the future - it lowers the effectiveness of those forces and may even cause the devitalized body to fall ill. In my present state, awareness was not referred to as ego; it was, so to speak, on its own.

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.