Aldous Huxley
Brave New World, visionary dystopian novelist
Most quoted
"As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. And the dictator (unless he is so foolish as to provoke resentment by forbidding it) will do well to encourage that freedom. In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope, the freedom to indulge in uninhibited sex will help reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their lot."
— from Brave New World Revisited, 1958
"The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend."
— from The Doors of Perception, 1954
"Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and then dismiss the matter from your mind. No amount of brooding on the past will alter what has happened. But by brooding on the past you can ruin the present and the future. These are the things to which one should pay attention."
— from Brave New World, 1932
All quotes by Aldous Huxley (265)
Words are like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.
One of the many things that one can do with words is to make them into a work of art.
The secret of happiness and virtue is to like what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.
But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.
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.
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline to the religion of solitude.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
To be able to choose, a man must be able to think. To be able to think, he must be able to question. To be able to question, he must not be afraid to doubt.
The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been achieved, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.
Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left.
Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and then dismiss the matter from your mind.
The people who kill the most are those who preach love.
The more you know, the more you see.
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
The human organism is a machine for converting all kinds of food into all kinds of nonsense.
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.
The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that the other set of people are human.
Children are at once the most vulnerable and the most resilient of creatures.
The world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.
Contemporaries of Aldous Huxley
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Aldous Huxley (1894–1963).