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Fortunately, However, Birds Don't Understand Pep Talks. Not Even St. Francis'. Just Imagine, He Went On, Preaching Sermons To Perfectly Good Thrushes And Goldfinches And Chiff-chaffs! What Presumption! Why Couldn't He Have Kept His Mouth Shut And Let The Birds Preach To Him?

-Aldous Huxley

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Fortunately, However, Birds Don't

Aldous Huxley

...

Fortunately, However, Birds Don't Understand Pep Talks. Not Even St. Francis'. Just Imagine, He Went On, Preaching Sermons To Perfectly Good Thrushes And Goldfinches And Chiff-chaffs! What Presumption! Why Couldn't He Have Kept His Mouth Shut And Let The Birds Preach To Him?

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Good Is That Which Makes For Unity. Evil Is That Which Makes For Separateness.

Happiness Is Not Achieved By The Conscious Pursuit Of Happiness; It Is Generally The By-product Of Other Activities.

Work Is Prayer. Work Is Also Stink. Therefore Stink Is Prayer.

Hell Is The Incapacity To Be Other Than The Creature One Finds Oneself Ordinarily Behaving As.

It Isn't A Matter Of Forgetting. What One Has To Learn Is How To Remember And Yet Be Free Of The Past.

If We Evolved A Race Of Isaac Newtons, That Would Not Be Progress. For The Price Newton Had To Pay For Being A Supreme Intellect Was That He Was Incapable Of Friendship, Love, Fatherhood, And Many Other Desirable Things. As A Man He Was A Failure; As A Monster He Was Superb.

A Man May Have Strong Humanitarian And Democratic Principles, But If He Happens To Have Been Brought Up As A Bath-taking, Shirt-changing Lover Of Fresh Air, He Will Have To Overcome Certain Physical Repugnance Before He Can Bring Himself To Put Those Principles Into Practice.

A Physical Shortcoming Could Produce A Kind Of Mental Excess. The Process, It Seemed, Was Reversible. Mental Excess Could Produce, For Its Own Purposes, The Voluntary Blindness And Deafness Of Deliberate Solitude, The Artificial Impotence Of Asceticism.

Of Course The Dharma-body Of The Buddha Was The Hedge At The Bottom Of The Garden. At The Same Time, And No Less Obviously, It Was These Flowers, It Was Anything That I - Or Rather The Blessed Not-i - Cared To Look At.

Art Is One Of The Means Whereby Man Seeks To Redeem A Life Which Is Experienced As Chaotic, Senseless, And Largely Evil.

Most Ignorances Are Vincible, And In The Greater Number Of Cases Stupidity Is What The Buddha Pronounced It To Be, A Sin. For, Consciously, Or Subconsciously, It Is With Deliberation That We Do Not Know Or Fail To Understand-because Incomprehension Allows Us, With A Good Conscience, To Evade Unpleasant Obligations And Responsibilities, Because Ignorance Is The Best Excuse For Going On Doing What One Likes, But Ought Not, To Do.

I Have Always Found That Angels Have The Vanity To Speak Of Themselves As The Only Wise.

To Talk About Religion Except In Terms Of Human Psychology Is An Irrelevance.

People Intoxicate Themselves With Work So They Won't See How They Really Are.

Ending Is Better Than Mending.

Procrustes In Modern Dress, The Nuclear Scientist Will Prepare The Bed On Which Mankind Must Lie; And If Mankind Doesn’t Fit—well, That Will Be Just Too Bad For Mankind. There Will Have To Be Some Stretching And A Bit Of Amputation—the Same Sort Of Stretching And Amputations As Have Been Going On Ever Since Applied Science Really Got Going Into Its Stride, Only This Time They Will Be A Good Deal More Drastic Than In The Past. These Far From Painless Operations Will Be Directed By Highly Centralized Totalitarian Governments.

The Surest Way To Work Up A Crusade In Favor Of Some Good Cause Is To Promise People They Will Have A Chance Of Maltreating Someone. To Be Able To Destroy With Good Conscience, To Be Able To Behave Badly And Call Your Bad Behavior 'righteous Indignation' — This Is The Height Of Psychological Luxury, The Most Delicious Of Moral Treats.

The Trouble With Fiction," Said John Rivers, "is That It Makes Too Much Sense. Reality Never Makes Sense.

There Is No Bad Day That Can’t Be Overcome By Listening To A Barbershop Quartet. This Is Just Truth, Plain And Simple.

Writers Write To Influence Their Readers, Their Preachers, Their Auditors, But Always, At Bottom, To Be More Themselves.

In Books, The Proportion Of Exceptional To Commonplace People Is High; In Reality, Very Low.

Nobody Can Have The Consolations Of Religion Or Philosophy Unless He Has First Experienced Their Desolations.

It’s Embarrassing To Tell You This, But It Seems To Come Down Mostly To Just Learning To Be Kinder.

God Isn't Compatible With Machinery And Scientific Medicine And Universal Happiness. You Must Make Your Choice. Our Civilization Has Chosen Machinery And Medicine And Happiness.

I Will Have No Parsons Around Me But Such As Drink Deep, Ride To Hounds And Caress The Wives And Daughters Of Their Parishioners.a Virtuous Parson Does Nothing To Test Or Exercise The Faith Of His Flock.

In Real Life There Is No Such Person As The Average Man.

Results Only Come To Those Who Master The Paradoxical Art Of Doing And Not Doing, Of Letting Go As A Person In Order That The Immanent And Transcendent Unknown Quantity May Take Hold. We Cannot Make Ourselves Understand; The Most We Can Do Is To Foster A State Of Mind In Which Understanding May Come To Us.

...most Men And Women Will Grow Up To Love Their Servitude And Will Never Dream Of Revolution.

To Travel Is To Discover That Everyone Is Wrong About Other Countries.

A Mind That Has Come To The Stillness Of Wisdom Shall Know Being, Shall Know What It Is To Love. Love Is Neither Personal Nor Impersonal. Love Is Love, Not To Be Defined Or Described By The Mind As Exclusive Or Inclusive. Love Is Its Own Eternity; It Is The Real, The Supreme, The Immeasurable.

In Spite Of Language, In Spite Of Intelligence And Intuition And Sympathy, One Can Never Really Communicate Anything To Anybody. The Essential Substance Of Every Thought And Feeling Remains Incommunicable, Locked Up In The Impenetrable Strong-room Of The Individual Soul And Body. Our Life Is A Sentence Of Perpetual Solitary Confinement.

They're Old; They're About God Hundreds Of Years Ago. Not About God Now" "but God Doesn't Change" "men Do Though

Brave New World Happiness

The Amelioration Of The World Cannot Be Achieved By Sacrifices In Moments Of Crisis; It Depends On The Efforts Made And Constantly Repeated During The Humdrum, Uninspiring Periods, Which Separate One Crisis From Another, And Of Which Normal Lives Mainly Consist.

Both Of Us Victims Of The Same Twentieth-century Plague. Not The Black Death, This Time; The Gray Life.

I'm Afraid Of Losing My Obscurity. Genuineness Only Thrives In The Dark. Like Celery.

Successfully (whatever That May Mean) Or Unsuccessfully, We All Overact The Part Of Our Favorite Character In Fiction.

We Shall Be Permitted To Live On This Planet Only For As Long As We Treat All Nature With Compassion And Intelligence.

Those Who Feel Themselves Despised Do Well To Look Despising.

It Takes Two To Make A Murder. There Are Born Victims, Born To Have Their Throats Cut, As The Cut-throats Are Born To Be Hanged.

Plasticene And Self-expression Will Not Solve The Problems Of Education. Nor Will Technology And Vocational Guidance; Nor The Classics And The Hundred Best Books.

Pully, Hauly, Tug With A Will; The Gods Wiggle Waggle, But The Sky Stands Still.

The More Stitches, The Less Riches.

Brave New World

There Isn't Any Formula Or Method. You Learn To Love By Loving - By Paying Attention And Doing What One Thereby Discovers Has To Be Done.

Abused As We Abuse It At Present, Dramatic Art Is In No Sense Cathartic; It Is Merely A Form Of Emotional Masturbation.

In Regard To Man's Final End, All The Higher Religions Are In Complete Agreement. The Purpose Of Human Life Is The Discovery Of Truth, The Unitive Knowledge Of The Godhead.

Love Is As Necessary To Human Beings As Food And Shelter; [but] Without Intelligence, ... Love Is Impotent And Freedom Unattainable.

I Think That Fiction And, As I Say, History And Biography Are Immensely Important, Not Only For Their Own Sake, Because They Provide A Picture Of Life Now And Of Life In The Past, But Also As Vehicles For The Expression Of General Philosophic Ideas, Religious Ideas, Social Ideas.

People Will Come To Love Their Oppression, To Adore The Technologies That Undo Their Capacities To Think.

The Present Moment Is The Only Aperture Through Which The Soul Can Pass Out Of Time Into Eternity, Through Which Grace Can Pass Out Of Eternity Into The Soul, And Through Which Love Can Pass From One Soul In Time To Another Soul In Time.

Now, A Corpse, Poor Thing, Is An Untouchable And The Process Of Decay Is, Of All Pieces Of Bad Manners, The Vulgarest Imaginable. For A Corpse Is, By Definition, A Person Absolutely Devoid Of Savoir Vivre.

Every Man Who Knows How To Read Has It In His Power To Magnify Himself, To Multiply The Ways In Which He Exists, To Make His Life Full, Significant And Interesting.

Man's Life On Earth Has Only One End And Purpose: To Identify Himself With His Eternal Self And So To Come To Unitive Knowledge Of The Divine Ground.

Abused As We Abuse It At Present, Dramatic Art Is In No Sense Cathartic; It Is Merely A Form Of Emotional Masturbation. It Is The Rarest Thing To Find A Player Who Has Not Had His Character Affected For The Worse By The Practice Of His Profession. Nobody Can Make A Habit Of Self-exhibition, Nobody Can Exploit His Personality For The Sake Of Exercising A Kind Of Hypnotic Power Over Others, And Remain Untouched By The Process.

The Optimum Population Is Modeled On The Iceberg- Eight-ninths Below The Water Line, One-ninth Above.

Brave New World

Societies Are Composed Of Individuals And Are Good Only Insofar As They Help Individuals To Realize Their Potentialities And To Lead A Happy And Creative Life.

You've Got To Be Hurt And Upset; Otherwise You Can't Think Of The Really Good, Penetrating, X-rayish Phrases.

Silence Is As Full Of Potential Wisdom And Wit As The Unshown Marble Of Great Sculpture. The Silent Bear No Witness Against Themselves.

All Conditioning Aims At That: Making People Like Their Inescapable Social Destiny.

Brave New World

I've Never Discussed My Writing With Others Much, But I Don't Believe It Can Do Any Harm. I Don't Think That There's Any Risk That Ideas Or Materials Will Evaporate.

Only A Person With A Best Seller Mind Can Write Best Sellers.

Finding Bad Reasons For What One Believes For Other Bad Reasons - That's Philosophy.

A Gramme Is Better Than A Damn.

Beauty Is Worse Than Wine, It Intoxicates Both The Holder And Beholder.

There Is Only One Corner Of The Universe You Can Be Certain Of Improving, And That's Your Own Self.

The Snapshots Had Become Almost As Dim As Memories.

For The Born Traveller, Travelling Is A Besetting Vice. Like Other Vices, It Is Imperious, Demanding Its Victim's Time, Money, Energy And The Sacrifice Of Comfort.

Everyone Thinks This Way At Some Point. The Important Thing Is To Power Through And Get To Learning. If You Really Don't Have The Time Let Me Handle Your Analytics.

God Isn't The Son Of Memory; He's The Son Of Immediate Experience. You Can't Worship A Spirit In Spirit, Unless You Do It Now. Wallowing In The Past May Be Good Literature. As Wisdom, It's Hopeless. Time Regained Is Paradise Lost, And Time Lost Is Paradise Regained. Let The Dead Bury Their Dead. If You Want To Live At Every Moment As It Presents Itself, You've Got To Die To Every Other Moment.

But Every One Belongs To Every One Else

Brave New World

Brave New World John

Brave New World Technology

My Sympathies Are, Of Course, With The Government Side, Especially The Anarchists ; For Anarchism Seems To Me More Likely To Lead To Desirable Social Change Than Highly Centralized, Dictatorial Communism .

Alpha Children Wear Grey. They Work Much Harder Than We Do, Because They're So Frightfully Clever. I'm Awfully Glad I'm A Beta, Because I Don't Work So Hard. And Then We Are Much Better Than The Gammas And Deltas. Gammas Are Stupid. They All Wear Green, And Delta Children Wear Khaki. Oh No, I Don't Want To Play With Delta Children. And Epsilons Are Still Worse. They're Too Stupid To Be Able To Read Or Write. Besides They Wear Black, Which Is Such A Beastly Color. I'm So Glad I'm A Beta.

It Is Only When We Have Renounced Our Preoccupation With "i," "me," "mine," That We Can Truly Possess The World In Which We Live. Everything, Provided That We Regard Nothing As Property. And Not Only Is Everything Ours; It Is Also Everybody Else's.

The Best Way To Find Things Out Is Not To Ask Questions At All. If You Fire Off A Question, It Is Like Firing Off A Gun - Bang It Goes

An Ideal Is Merely The Projection, On An Enormously Enlarged Scale, Of Some Aspect Of Personality.

Most Human Beings Have An Almost Infinite Capacity For Taking Things For Granted.

Nobody Needs To Go Anywhere Else. We Are All, If We Only Knew It, Already There. If I Only Knew Who In Fact I Am, I Should Cease To Behave As What I Think I Am; And If I Stopped Behaving As What I Think I Am, I Should Know Who I Am. What In Fact I Am, If Only The Manichee I Think I Am Would Allow Me To Know It, Is The Reconciliation Of Yes And No Lived Out In Total Acceptance And The Blessed Experience Of Not-two. In Religion All Words Are Dirty Words. Anybody Who Gets Eloquent About Buddha, Or God, Or Christ, Ought To Have His Mouth Washed Out With Carbolic Soap.

In The Course Of Evolution Nature Has Gone To Endless Trouble To See That Every Individual Is Unlike Every Other Individual....physically And Mentally, Each One Of Us Is Unique. Any Culture Which, In The Interests Of Efficiency Or In The Name Of Some Political Or Religious Dogma, Seeks To Standardize The Human Individual, Commits An Outrage Against Man's Biological Nature.

The Moral Peril To Humanity Of Thoughtlessly Accepting These Conveniences [of Materialism] (with Their Inherent Disadvantages) As Constituting A Philosophy Of Life Is Now Becoming Apparent. For The Implications Of This Disruptive Materialism... Are That Human Beings Are Nothing But Bodies, Animals, Machines.

Official Dignity Tends To Increase In Inverse Ratio To The Importance Of The Country In Which The Office Is Held.

The Greatest Triumphs Of Propoganda Have Been Accomplished, 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.

Brave New World

The Old Idea That Words Possess Magical Powers Is False; But Its Falsity Is The Distortion Of A Very Important Truth. Words Do Have A Magical Effect - But Not In The Way That Magicians Supposed, And Not On The Objects They Were Trying To Influence. Words Are Magical In The Way They Affect The Minds Of Those Who Use Them.

Man Is Hypnotized By The Glitter Of His Own Gadgetry

Single-mindedness Is All Very Well In Cows Or Baboons; In An Animal Claiming To Belong To The Same Species As Shakespeare, It Is Simply Disgraceful.

Every Idol, However Exalted, Turns Out, In The Long Run, To Be A Moloch, Hungry For Human Sacrifice.

Man Is An Intelligence In Servitude To His Organs.

What With Making Their Way And Enjoying What They Have Won, Heroes Have No Time To Think. But The Sons Of Heroes - Ah, They Have All The Necessary Leisure.

Universal Education Has Created An Immense Class Of What I May Call The New Stupid, Hungering For Certainty Yet Unable To Find It In The Traditional Myths And Their Rationalizations.

Speed, It Seems To Me, Provides The One Genuinely Modern Pleasure.

A Man Who Has Trained Himself In Goodness Come To Have Certain Direct Intuitions About Character, About The Relations Between Human Beings, About His Own Position In The World - Intuitions That Are Quite Different From The Intuitions Of The Average Sensual Man.

That All Men Are Equal Is A Proposition To Which, At Ordinary Times, No Sane Human Being Has Ever Given His Assent.

In Regard To Propaganda The Early Advocates Of Universal Literacy And A Free Press Envisaged Only Two Possibilities: The Propaganda Might Be True, Or The Propaganda Might Be False. They Did Not Foresee What In Fact Has Happened, Above All In Our Western Capitalist Democracies - The Development Of A Vast Mass Communications Industry, Concerned In The Main Neither With The True Nor The False, But With The Unreal, The More Or Less Totally Irrelevant. In A Word, They Failed To Take Into Account Man's Almost Infinite Appetite For Distractions.

Can We Unite Against Ourselves For Our Own Higher Interest?

Oh, How Desperately Bored, In Spite Of Their Grim Determination To Have A Good Time, The Majority Of Pleasure-seekers Really Are!

Consistency Is Contrary To Nature, Contrary To Life. The Only Completely Consistent People Are Dead.

The Thin And Precarious Crust Of Decency Is All That Separates Any Civilization, However Impressive, From The Hell Of Anarchy Or Systematic Tyranny Which Lie In Wait Beneath The Surface .

The Indispensible Is Not Necessarily The Desirable.

It Is Only When It Takes The Form Of Physical Addiction That Sex Is Evil. It Is Also Evil When It Manifests Itself As A Way Of Satisfying The Lust For Power Or The Climber's Craving For Position And Social Distinction.

Uncontrolled, The Hunger And Thirst After God May Become An Obstacle, Cutting Off The Soul From What It Desires. If A Man Would Travel Far Along The Mystic Road, He Must Learn To Desire God Intensely But In Stillness, Passively And Yet With All His Heart And Mind And Strength.

The People Who Kill And Torture And Tell Lies In The Name Of Their Sacred Causes, These Are Never The Publicans And The Sinners. No, They're The Virtuous, Respectable Men, Who Have The Finest Feelings, The Best Brains, The Noblest Ideals.

No Romeo-and-juliet Acts, No Nonsense About Love With A Large L, None Of That Popular Song Claptrap With Its Skies Of Blue, Dreams Come True, Heaven With You. Just Sensuality For Its Own Sake.

There Are Many Kinds Of Gods. Therefore There Are Many Kinds Of Men.

I Am Ignorant And Impotent And Yet, Somehow Or Other, Here I Am, Unhappy, No Doubt, Profoundly Dissatisfied ... In Spite Of Everything I Survive.

The Course Of Every Intellectual, If He Pursues His Journey Long And Unflinchingly Enough, Ends In The Obvious, From Which The Non-intellectuals Have Never Stirred.

The Soul Of Wit May Become The Very Body Of Untruth. However Elegant And Memorable, Brevity Can Never, In The Nature Of Things, Do Justice To All The Facts Of A Complex Situations. On Such A Theme One Can Be Brief Only By Omission And Simplification. Omission And Simplification Help Us To Understand - But Help Is, In Many Cases, To Understand The Wrong Thing; For Our Comprehension May Be Only Of The Abbreviator's Neatly Formulated Notions, Not Of The Vast, Ramifying Reality From Which These Notions Have Been So Arbitrarily Abstracted.

It's Dark Because You Are Trying Too Hard. Lightly Child, Lightly. Learn To Do Everything Lightly. Yes, Feel Lightly Even Though You're Feeling Deeply. Just Lightly Let Things Happen And Lightly Cope With Them. So Throw Away Your Baggage And Go Forward. There Are Quicksands All About You, Sucking At Your Feet, Trying To Suck You Down Into Fear And Self-pity And Despair. That's Why You Must Walk So Lightly. Lightly My Darling.

And There's Always Soma To Calm Your Anger, To Reconcile You To Your Enemies, To Make You Patient And Long-suffering. In The Past, You Could Only Accomplish These Things By Making A Great Effort And After Years Of Hard Moral Training. Now, You Swallow Two Or Three Half-gramme Tablets, And There You Are. Anybody Can Be Virtuous Now. You Can Carry At Least Half Your Morality About In A Bottle. Christianity Without Tears-that's What Soma Is.

Brave New World

Liberty? Why It Doesn't Exist. There Is No Liberty In This World, Just Gilded Cages.

A Man Can Smile And Smile And Be A Villain.

Hamlet And Ophelia

Science Has Explained Nothing; The More We Know The More Fantastic The World Becomes And The Profounder The Surrounding Darkness.

Generalized Intelligence And Mental Alertness Are The Most Powerful Enemies Of Dictatorship And At The Same Time The Basic Conditions Of Effective Democracy.

Give Us This Day Our Daily Faith, But Deliver Us, Dear God, From Belief.

But A Priest's Life Is Not Supposed To Be Well-rounded; It Is Supposed To Be One-pointed - A Compass, Not A Weathercock.

Since Mozart's Day Composers Have Learned The Art Of Making Music Throatily And Palpitatingly Sexual.

Every Gain Made By Individuals Or Society Is Almost Instantly Taken For Granted.

Given The Nature Of Spiders, Webs Are Inevitable. And Given The Nature Of Human Beings, So Are Religions. Spiders Can't Help Making Fly-traps, And Men Can't Help Making Symbols. That's What The Human Brain Is There For - The Turn The Chaos Of Given Experience Into A Set Of Manageable Symbols.

The Whole Story Of The Universe Is Implicit In Any Part Of It. The Meditative Eye Can Look Through Any Single Object And See, As Through A Window, The Entire Cosmos. Make The Smell Of Roast Duck In An Old Kitchen Diaphanous And You Will Have A Glimpse Of Everything, From The Spiral Nebulae To Mozart's Music And The Stigmata Of St. Francis Of Assisi. The Artistic Problem Is To Produce Diaphanousness In Spots, Selecting The Spots So As To Reveal Only The Most Humanly Significant Of Distant Vistas Behind The Near Familiar Object.

You All Remember, I Suppose, That Beautiful And Inspired Saying Of Our Ford's: History Is Bunk.

Brave New World

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.

Brave New World

The Nature Of Oratory Is Such That There Has Always Been A Tendency Among Politicians And Clergymen To Oversimplify Complex Matters. From A Pulpit Or A Platform Even The Most Conscientious Of Speakers Finds It Very Difficult To Tell The Whole Truth.

If Only People Would Realize That Moral Principles Are Like Measles.... They Have To Be Caught. And Only The People Who've Got Them Can Pass On The Contagion.

Every Ceiling Reached Becomes A Floor.

This Growing Poverty In The Midst Of Growing Population Constitutes A Permanent Menace To Peace. And Not Only To Peace, But Also To Democratic Institutions And Personal Liberty For Overpopulation Is Not Compatible With Freedom.

The Silent Bear No Witness Against Themselves.

I Write Everything Many Times Over. All My Thoughts Are Second Thoughts.

Second Thoughts

Wherever The Choice Has Had To Be Made Between The Man Of Reason And The Madman, The World Has Unhesitatingly Followed The Madman.

One Of The Principal Functions Of A Friend Is To Suffer (in A Milder And Symbolic Form) The Punishments That We Should Like, But Are Unable, To Inflict Upon Our Enemies.

Brave New World

What Wonder, Then, If Human Beings In Their Search For The Divine Have Generally Preferred To Look Within!

Culture Is Like The Sum Of Special Knowledge That Accumulates In Any Large United Family And Is The Common Property Of All Its Members. When We Of The Great Culture Family Meet, We Exchange Reminiscences About Grandfather Homer, And That Awful Old Dr. Johnson, And Aunt Sappho, And Poor Johnny Keats.

Man Approaches The Unattainable Truth Through A Succession Of Errors.

Our Vanity Makes Us Exaggerate The Importance Of Human Life; The Individual Is Nothing; Nature Cares Only For The Species.

Addiction Is An Increasing Desire For An Act That Gives Less And Less Satisfaction

Dictators Can Always Consolidate Their Tyranny By An Appeal To Patriotism.

Assemble A Mob Of Men And Women Previously Conditioned By A Daily Reading Of The Newspapers; Treat Them To Amplified Band Music, Bright Lights...and In Next To No Time You Can Reduce Them To A State Of Almost Mindless Subhumanity. Never Before Have So Few Been In A Position To Make Fools, Maniacs, Or Criminals Of So Many.

Technological Progress Has Merely Provided Us With More Efficient Means For Going Backwards.

We Lie To Ourselves In Order That We May Still Have The Excuse Of Ignorance, The Alibi Of Stupidity And Incomprehension, Possessing Which We Can Continue With A Good Conscience To Commit And Tolerate The Most Monstrous Crimes.

Armaments, Universal Debt And Planned Obsolescence - Those Are The Three Pillars Of Western Prosperity.

Consciousness Is Only Possible Through Change; Change Is Only Possible Through Movement.

Real Orgies Are Never So Exciting As Pornographic Books. In A Volume By Pierre Louys All The Girls Are Young And Their Figures Perfect; There's No Hiccoughing Or Bad Breath, No Fatigue Or Boredom, No Sudden Recollections Of Unpaid Bills Or Business Letters Unanswered, To Interrupt The Raptures. Art Gives You The Sensation, The Thought, The Feeling Quite Pure--chemically Pure, I Mean,... Not Morally.

Somewhere In The Rain, There Will Always Be An Abandoned Dog That Prevents You From Being Happy.

Fortunately, However, Birds Don't Understand Pep Talks. Not Even St. Francis'. Just Imagine, He Went On, Preaching Sermons To Perfectly Good Thrushes And Goldfinches And Chiff-chaffs! What Presumption! Why Couldn't He Have Kept His Mouth Shut And Let The Birds Preach To Him?

On No Account Brood Over Your Wrongdoing. Rolling In The Muck Is Not The Best Way Of Getting Clean.

Brave New World

At This Very Moment,... The Most Frightful Horrors Are Taking Place In Every Corner Of The World. People Are Being Crushed, Slashed, Disembowelled, Mangled; Their Dead Bodies Rot And Their Eyes Decay With The Rest. Screams Of Pain And Fear Go Pulsing Through The Air At The Rate Of Eleven Hundred Feet Per Second. After Travelling For Three Seconds They Are Perfectly Inaudible. These Are Distressing Facts; But Do We Enjoy Life Any The Less Because Of Them? Most Certainly We Do Not.

Such Prosperity As We Have Known It Up To The Present Is The Consequence Of Rapidly Spending The Planet's Irreplaceable Capital.

The Pleasures Of Ignorance Are As Great, In Their Way, As The Pleasures Of Knowledge.

Stupidity And Ignorance

The Horror No Less Than The Charm Of Real Life Consists Precisely In The Recurrent Actualization Of The Inconceivable

I Dread The Inevitable Acceleration Of American World Domination Which Will Be The Result Of It All...europe Will No Longer Be Europe.

And So, Resisting The Temptation To Wallow In Artistic Remorse, I Prefer To Leave Both Well And Ill Alone And To Think About Something Else

Industrial Man—a Sentient Reciprocating Engine Having A Fluctuating Output, Coupled To An Iron Wheel Revolving With Uniform Velocity. And Then We Wonder Why This Should Be The Golden Age Of Revolution And Mental Derangement.

For In Spite Of Language, In Spite Of Intelligence And Intuition And Sympathy, One Can Never Really Communicate Anything To Anybody.

Actual Happiness Always Looks Pretty Squalid In Comparison With The Overcompensations For Misery. And, Of Course, Stability Isn't Nearly So Spectacular As Instability. And Being Contented Has None Of The Glamour Of A Good Fight Against Misfortune, None Of The Picturesqueness Of A Struggle With Temptation, Or A Fatal Overthrow By Passion Or Doubt. Happiness Is Never Grand.

It Had The Taste Of An Apple Peeled With A Steel Knife. (sebastian Barnack Assessing A Roederer 1916 Champagne In Time Must Have A Stop)

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 Sure, 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

Her Cheeks Were Flushed. She Caught Hold Of The Savage's Arm And Pressed It, Limp, Against Her Side. He Looked Down At Her For A Moment, Pale, Pained, Desiring, And Ashamed Of His Desire. He Was Not Worthy, Not... Their Eyes For A Moment Met. What Treasures Hers Promised! A Queen's Ransom Of Temperament. Hastily He Looked Away, Disengaged His Imprisoned Arm. He Was Obscurely Terrified Lest She Should Cease To Be Something He Could Feel Himself Unworthy Of.

Deprived Of Their Newspapers Or A Novel, Reading-addicts Will Fall Back Onto Cookery Books, On The Literature Which Is Wrapped Around Bottles Of Patent Medicine, On Those Instructions For Keeping The Contents Crisp Which Are Printed On The Outside Of Boxes Of Breakfast Cereals. On Anything.

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.

A Man May Be A Pessimistic Determinist Before Lunch And An Optimistic Believer In The Will's Freedom After It.

In Actual Life A Downward Movement May Sometimes Be Made The Beginning Of An Ascent.

Experience Is Not A Matter Of Having Actually Swum The Hellespont, Or Danced With The Dervishes, Or Slept In A Doss-house. It Is A Matter Of Sensibility And Intuition, Of Seeing, And Hearing The Significant Thing, Of Paying Attention At The Right Moments, Of Understanding And Coordinating. Experience Is Not What Happens To A Man; It Is What A Man Does With What Happens To Him.

Significant Things

I Was Born Wandering Between Two Worlds, One Dead, The Other Powerless To Be Born, And Have Made, In A Curious Way, The Worst Of Both.

The Propagandist's Purpose Is To Make One Set Of People Forget That Certain Other Sets Of People Are Human.

The Really Important Facts Were That Spatial Relationships Had Ceased To Matter Very Much And That My Mind Was Perceiving The World In Terms Of Other Than Spatial Categories. At Ordinary Times The Eye Concerns Itself With Such Problems As Where? — How Far? — How Situated In Relation To What? In The Mescaline Experience The Implied Questions To Which The Eye Responds Are Of Another Order. Place And Distance Cease To Be Of Much Interest. The Mind Does Its Perceiving In Terms Of Intensity Of Existence, Profundity Of Significance, Relationships Within A Pattern.

If One's Different, One's Bound To Be Lonely.

Only One More Indispensable Massacre Of Capitalists Or Communists Or Fascists Or Christians Or Heretics, And There We Are In The Golden Future.

An Unexciting Truth May Be Eclipsed By A Thrilling Lie.

But The Quiet Grows And Grows. Beautifully And Unbearably.

God: A Gaseous Vertebrate.

The Bhagavad-gita Is The Most Systematic Statement Of Spiritual Evolution Of Endowing Value To Mankind. It Is One Of The Most Clear And Comprehensive Summaries Of Perennial Philosophy Ever Revealed; Hence Its Enduring Value Is Subject Not Only To India But To All Of Humanity.

No Holiday Is Ever Anything But A Disappointment.

To Make This Trivial World Sublime, Take Half A Gram Of Phanerothyme.

The Greater A Man's Talents, The Greater His Power To Lead Astray.

Brave New World

Those Who Believe That They Are Exclusively In The Right Are Generally Those Who Achieve Something.

A Bad Book Is As Much Of A Labor To Write As A Good One, It Comes As Sincerely From The Author's Soul.

Teaching Is The Last Refuge Of Feeble Minds With A Classical Education.

[...] Technology Has Tended To Devaluate The Traditional Vision-inducing Materials. The Illumination Of A City, For Example, Was Once A Rare Event, Reserved For Victories And National Holidays, For The Canonization Of Saints And The Crowning Of Kings. Now It Occurs Nightly And Celebrates The Virtues Of Gin, Cigarettes And Toothpaste.

Applied Science Is A Conjuror, Whose Bottomless Hat Yields Impartially The Softest Of Angora Rabbits And The Most Petrifying Of Medusas.

We Objected To The Morality Because It Interfered With Our Sexual Freedom.

Meaninglessness

People Travel For The Same Reason As They Collect Works Of Art: Because The Best People Do It.

Suppose It Were Perfectly Certain That The Life And Fortune Of Each Of Us Would Some Day Depend Upon Our Winning Or Losing A Game Of Chess. Do You Not Think That We Should All Consider It To Be Our Primary Duty To Learn At Least The Names Of The Pieces And How To Position Them On The Chessboard?

The Gods Are Just. No Doubt. But Their Code Of Law Is Dictated, In The Last Resort, By The People Who Organize Society; Providence Takes Its Cue From Men.

Brave New World

Hell Isn't Merely Paved With Good Intentions; It's Walled And Roofed With Them. Yes, And Furnished Too.

Good Intentions

Specialized Meaninglessness Has Come To Be Regarded, In Certain Circles, As A Kind Of Hallmark Of True Science.

But The Nature Of The Universe Is Such That Ends Can Never Justify Means. On The Contrary, The Means Always Determine The End.

The Religions Whose Theology Is Least Preoccupied With Events In Time And Most Concerned With Eternity, Have Been Consistently Less Violent And More Humane In Political Practice. Unlike Early Judaism, Christianity And Mohammedanism (all Obsessed With Time) Hinduism And Buddhism Have Never Been Persecuting Faiths, Have Preached Almost No Holy Wars And Have Refrained From That Proselytizing Religious Imperialism Which Has Gone Hand In Hand With Political And Economic Oppression Of Colored People.

Hitler's Vast Propaganda Successes Were Accomplished With Little More Than The Radio And Loudspeaker, And Without Tv And Tape And Video Recording . . . Today The Art Of Mind Control Is In The Process Of Becoming A Science.

A Large City Cannot Be Experientially Known; Its Life Is Too Manifold For Any Individual To Be Able To Participate In It.

Of The Significant And Pleasurable Experiences Of Life Only The Simplest Are Open Indiscriminately To All. The Rest Cannot Be Had Except By Those Who Have Undergone A Suitable Training.

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.

Brave New World

People Are Much Too Solemn About Things - I'm All For Sticking Pins Into Episcopal Behinds.

Life Is Short And Information Endless: Nobody Has Time For Everything

To Be Excited Is Still To Be Unsatisfied.

Under The Present Dispensation, The Great Majority Of Factories Are Little Despotisms, Benevolent In Some Cases, Malevolent In Others. Even Where Benevolence Prevails, Passive Obedience Is Demanded By The Workers, Who Are Ruled By Overseers, Not Of Their Own Election, But Appointed From Above. In Theory They May Be The Subjects Of A Democratic State; But In Practice They Spend The Whole Of Their Working Lives As The Subjects Of A Petty Tyrant.

Nothing Short Of Everything Will Really Do.

We Are So Anxious To Achieve Some Particular End That We Never Pay Attention To The Psycho-physical Means Whereby That End Is To Be Gained. So Far As We Are Concerned, Any Old Means Is Good Enough. But The Nature Of The Universe Is Such That Ends Can Never Justify The Means. On The Contrary, The Means Always Determine The End.

You Should Hurry Up And Acquire The Cigar Habit. It's One Of The Major Happinesses. And So Much More Lasting Than Love, So Much Less Costly In Emotional Wear And Tear.

Impulse Arrested Spills Over, And The Flood Is Feeling, The Flood Is Passion, The Flood Is Even Madness: It Depends On The Force Of The Current, The Height And Strength Of The Barrier. The Unchecked Stream Flows Smoothly Down Its Appointed Channels Into A Calm Well Being.

Most Ignorance Is Vincible Ignorance. We Don't Know Because We Don't Want To Know.

It's With Bad Sentiments That One Makes Good Novels.

Blood Of The World, Time Staunchless Flows; The Wound Is Mortal And Is Mine.

For What We Think And Feel And Are Is To A Great Extent Determined By The State Of Our Ductless Glands And Our Viscera.

People Believe In God Because They've Been Conditioned To Believe In God.

Brave New World Character

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Jacob K. Javits

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