Aldous Huxley - poet and a prophet.

[marmar]

I ran across some Huxley quotes today that are very apropros for these times. Brilliant man.


At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity: idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religous or political ideas.

Experience teaches only the teachable.

If you look up 'Intelligence' in the new volumes of the Encyclopeadia Britannica, you'll find it classified under the following three heads: Intelligence, Human; Intelligence, Animal; Intelligence, Military. My stepfather's a perfect specimen of Intelligence, Military.

Maybe this world is another planet's hell.

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

[On the Road]

1. I Read Huxley and Freud When I Was 16

and they blew my mind.

Huxley also said:

“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception” (Note: makes you wonder about Rumsfeld)

“To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.”

“Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.”

“The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own”

“Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.”

“Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad”

[Jonathan50]

2. I read _Brave New World_ when I was about twelve.

I thought it was a utopian novel then.

It was only later that I came to understand that Huxley was describing a dystopia.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
--Aldous Huxley, "Proper Studies", 1927

That all men are equal is a proposition which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent.
--Aldous Huxley

A country which proposes to make use of modern war as an instrument of policy must possess a highly centralized, all-powerful executive, hence the absurdity of talking about the defense of democracy by force of arms. A democracy which makes or effectively prepares for modern scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic.
--Aldous Huxley

Chastity: the most unnatural of the sexual perversions.
--Aldous Huxley

Folly is often more cruel in the consequences than malice can be in the intent.
--Aldous Huxley

Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly- they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.
--Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963), A Brave New World