Quotes from Aldous Huxley

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

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.

Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.

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.

What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.

Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.

God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.

Almost all of us long for peace and freedom; but very few of us have much enthusiasm for the thoughts, feelings, and actions that make for peace and freedom.

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners — let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.

Chastity—the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.

There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.

People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.

Great scientific discoveries have been made by men seeking to verify quite erroneous theories about the nature of things.

Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.

Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.

From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.

There are few who would not rather be taken in adultery than in provincialism.

Science has explained nothing the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.

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.'