Aldous Huxley Quotes

Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one’s never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

One of the great 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.

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

We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.

There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

An intellectual is a person who’s found one thing that’s more interesting than sex.

Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

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

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

The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.

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