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)
We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.
The brighter the light, the darker the shadow.
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 madmen.
Liberties are not given, they are taken.
The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.
Contemporaries of Aldous Huxley
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Aldous Huxley (1894–1963).