Huxley Quotes

[Anidawehi]

Here are some quotes from Aldous Huxley . . .
Yall really need to pick up his "Collected Essay" series.
I doubt any of you will actually read any of them . . . but who knows, maybe one of you will surprise me.

ADVERTISING:
"The popular philosophy . . . is now molded by the writers of advertising copy, whose one idea is to persuade everybody to be as extroverted and uninhibitedly greedy as possible, since of course it is only the possessive, the restless, the distracted, who spend money on the things that advertisers want to sell." - 1946

APPEARANCES:
"Things are not what they seem; or, to be more accurate, they are not only what they seem, but very much else besides." - 1945

BRAINWASHING:
"If these emotions [i.e., fear, rage or anxiety] are kept at a high pitch of intensity for a long enough time, the brain goes 'on strike.' When this happens, new behavior patterns may be installed with the greatest of ease." - 1958

CAMPAIGNS:
"The methods now being used to merchandise the political candidate as though he were a deoderant positively gurantee the electorate against ever hearing the truth about anything." - 1958

CAUSE AND EFFECT:
"In the spiritual life, every cause is also an effect, and every effect is at the same time a cause." - 1945

CHARITY:
"Charity is disinterested, seeking no reward, nor allowing itself to be diminished by any return of evil for its good." - 1946

CHASTITY:
"Chastity - the most unnatural of all sexual perversions." - 1936

CHRISTIANITY:
"The church allows people to believe that they can be good Christians and yet draw dividends from armament factories, can be good Christians and yet imperil the well-being of their fellows by speculating in stocks and shares, can be good Christians and yet be imperialists, yet participate in war. All that is required of the good Christian is chastity and a modicum of charity in immediate personal relations." - 1937

COMMUNICATIONS:
"The mass communications industry is concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant." - 1958

COMPASSION:
"To feel compassion is to feel that we are in some sort and to some extent responsible for the pain that is being inflicted, that we ought to do something about it." - 1933

CONTEMPLATION:
"Contemplation is that condition of alert passivity in which the soul lays itself open to the divine Ground within and without, the immanent and transcendant Godhead." - 1946

CRISES:
"Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government." - 1958

CROWDS:
"To be a member of a crowd is an experience closely akin to alcoholic intoxication. Most human beings feel a craving to escape from the cramping limitations of their ego, to take periodical holidays from their all too familiar, all too squalid little selves. As they do not know how to travel upwards from personality into a region of super-personality and as they are unwilling, even if they do know, to fulfill the ethical, psychological and physiological conditions of self-transcendence, they turn naturally to the descending road, the road that leads down from personality to the darkness of subhuman emotionism and panic animality." - 1937

DIVORCE:
"There are already certain American cities in which the number of divorces is equal to the number of marriages. In a few years, no doubt, marriage licenses will be sold like dog licenses, good for a period of twelve months, with no law against changing dogs or keeping more than one animal at a time." - 1932

PSYCHIATRIC DRUGS:
"The daily soma ration was an insurance against personal maladjustment, social unrest and the spread of subversive ideas. Religion, Karl Marx declares, is the opum of the people. In the Brave New World, this situation was reversed. Opium, or rather soma, was the people's religion." - 1958

EQUALITY:
"The most propitious environment for equality is constituted by a society where the means of production are owned cooperatively, where power is decentralized, and where the community is organized in a multiplicity of small, interrelated but, as far as may be, self-governing groups of mutually responsible men and women." - 1937

FACTS:
"Facts do not cease to exist simply because they are ignored by those who profit off concealing them." - 1927

GOD AND MAN:
"God is equally present in all creatures; but all creatures are not equally aware of the fact." - 1945

"It is only by becoming Godlike that we can know God - and to become Godlike is to identify ourselves with the divine element which in fact constitutes our essential nature, but of which, in our mainly voluntary ignorance, we choose to remain unaware." - 1946

GOOD AND EVIL:
"Good is that which makes for unity; Evil is that which makes for division." - 1937

"Thoughts and actions are good, when they make us, morally and spiritually, more capable of realizing the God who is ours, immenently in every soul and transcendently as that universal principle in which we live and move and have our being. They are bad when they tend to reinforce the barriers which stand between God and our souls, or the souls of other beings." - 1945

[Anidawehi]

GRACE:
"Spiritual grace cannot be received continuously or in its fullness except by those who have willed away their self-will to the point of being able truthfully to say, 'Not I, but God in me.'" - 1946

HAPPINESS:
"Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities." - 1945

HERO-WORSHIP:
"More books have been written about Napoleon than about any other human being. The fact is deeply and alarmingly significant. What must be the daydreams of people for whom the world's most agile social climber and ablest bandit is the hero they most desire to hear about? Duces and Fuehrers will cease to plague the world only when the majority of its inhabitants regard such adventurers with the same disgust as they now bestow on swindlers and pimps. So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable. The proper attitude toward the "hero" is nor Carlyle's but Bacon's. 'He doth like the ape,' wrote Bacon of the ambitious tyrant, ". . . the higher he climbs, the more he shows his arse." The hero's qualities are brilliant; but so is the mandrill's rump." - 1937

IDEAS:
"The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar . . . Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted and always derided as fools and madment." - 1927

IGNORANCE:
"We don't know because we don't want to know." - 1937

INDOCTRINATION:
"A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers." - 1932

INTELLECTUAL:
"An intellectual is a person who has learned to establish relations between the different elements of his sum of knowledge, one who possesses a coherent system of relationships into which he can fit all such new items of information as he may pick up in the course of his life." - 1937

MANIPULATION:
"Never have so many been manipulated so much, so often by so few." - 1958

MOBS:
"Assemble a mob of men and women previously conditioned by a daily reading of newspapers; treat them to amplified band music, bright lights, and the oratory of a demagogue who . . . is simultaneously the exploiter and the victim of herd intoxication, and in next to no time you can reduce them to a state of almost mind-less sub-humanity. Never before have so few been in a position to make fools, maniacs, or criminals of so many." - 1952

MONEY:
"Money speaks and it imposes silence among those who should be speaking." - 1956

PARADOXES:
"We are confronted by the great paradox of human life. It is our conditioning which develops our consciousness, but in order to make full use of this developed consciousness, we must start by getting rid of the conditioning which developed it." - 1956

PATRIOTISM:
"One of the greatest attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous." - 1936

PERCEPTION:
"What we perceive and understand depends upon what we are." - 1937

PROCRASTINATION:
"Never put off until tomorrow the fun that you can have today." - 1932

PROGRESS:
"Industrialism is the systematic exploitation of wasting assets. In all too many cases, the thing we call progress is merely an acceleration in the rate of that exploitation." - 1950

PURPOSE:
"God is. That is the primordial fact. It is in order that we may discover this fact for ourselves, by direct experience, that we exist. The final end and purpose of every human being is the unitive knowledge of God's being." - 1945

REALITY:
"Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and the more terrible becomes the price that must be paid." - 1945

REFORM:
"Individual reformation is a necessary prerequisite and condition of social reformation." - 1945

REFORMER:
"The reformer must attack simultaneously on all the fronts, from the metaphysical to the economic; if he does not, he cannot hope to achieve more than a partial success." - 1936

REVOLUTIONARIES:
"Nothing stands between the people's miserable present and its glorious future, except a minority, perhaps a majority, of perverse or merely ignorant individuals. All that is necessary is to liquidate a few thousands, or it may be a few millions, of these living obstacles to progress, and then to coerce and propagandize the rest into acquiescence. When these unpleasant but necessary preliminaries are over, the golden age will begin. Such is the theory of that secular apocalypticism, which is the religion of revolutionaries. But in practice, it is hardly necessary to say, the means employed positively gurantee that the end actually reached shall be profoundly different from that which the prophetic theorists enivisioned." - 1945


and last but not leas . . .

"Science takes no cognizance of the things that make life worth living, for the simple reason that beauty, love, and so on, are not measurable quantities, and science deals only with what can be measured." - 1929

"Speacialized meaninglessness has, in some circles, become regarded as science." - 1929

[cock juggler]

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[BeEgEe]

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[M.Maestro]

reminds me of that dude on dont be a menace

when shawn wayans was in jail and dude was like


" if you hurt a man, in time, his wounds will heal "

[M.Maestro]

"and if you steal from a man, you can replace what you borrowed"

[Anidawehi]

You know, I've never seen that movie.

[McGirth]

interesting quotes. i'll read it this summer.

[Anidawehi]

6 Books

It's a collection of his Essays between the 1920's - 1960's

[Ghet for Prez]

On the cuff of postmodernism.

Without a nuke either!

Well.. for most of it.

He has failed to address methods of achieving this. He assumed depression and retreat to be prime motivators. He failed to address population mechanics.

[Anidawehi]

Have you read his collection of essays?

[Ghet for Prez]

Huxley does not talk about population mechanics in any sense of the word in any of his works.

Sci-Fi dystopias rarely do... if ever.

[Anidawehi]

Have you read his collected essays? Yes or No?