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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.

-Aldous Huxley

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Hitler's Vast Propaganda Successes

Aldous Huxley

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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.

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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.

To Associate With Other Like-minded People In Small, Purposeful Groups Is For The Great Majority Of Men And Women A Source Of Profound Psychological Satisfaction. Exclusiveness Will Add To The Pleasure Of Being Several, But At One; And Secrecy Will Intensify It Almost To Ecstasy.

Words Form The Thread On Which We String Our Experiences. [therefore Be Careful How You Interpret Your Life. Don't Think Or Speak Negatively Lest Your Subconscious And Others Take You At Your Word And You Are Hung By Your Own Tongue!]

Bondage Is The Life Of Personality, And For Bondage The Personal Self Will Fight With Tireless Resourcefulness And The Most Stubborn Cunning.

To Those Who Think That Liberty Is A Good Thing, And That It May Someday Be Possible For People To Live In A Society Fit For Free, Fully Human Individuals, A Thorough Education In The Nature Of Language, Its Uses And Abuses, Seems Indispensable.

I Am Entirely On The Side Of Mystery. I Mean, Any Attempt To Explain Away The Mystery Is Ridiculous. I Believe In The Profound And Unfathomable Mystery Of Life Which Has A Sort Of Divine Quality About It.

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

No Less Than War Or Statecraft, The History Of Economics Has Its Heroic Ages.

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

We Live Together, We Act On, And React To One Another; But Always, And In All Circumstances, We Are By Ourselves.

Doors Of Perception

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.

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.

Within The Next Generation I Believe That The World's Leaders Will Discover That Infant Conditioning And Narco-hypnosis Are More Efficient, As Instruments Of Government, Than Clubs And Prisons, And That The Lust For Power Can Be Just As Completely Satisfied By Suggesting People Into Loving Their Servitude As By Flogging Them And Kicking Them Into Obedience.

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

The Critics Don't Interest Me Because They're Concerned With What's Past And Done, While I'm Concerned With What Comes Next.

Grace Is Always Sufficient, Provided We Are Ready To Cooperate With It. If We Fail To Do Our Share, But Rather Choose To Rely On Self-will And Self-direction, We Shall Not Only Get No Help From The Graces Bestowed On Us, We Shall Actually Make It Impossible For Further Graces To Be Given.

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

People Will Insist On Treating The Mons Veneris As Though It Were Mount Everest. Too Silly!

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.

Nothing — The Only Perfection, The Only Absolute. Infinite And Eternal Nothing.

Beware Of Being Too Rational. In The Country Of The Insane, The Integrated Man Doesn't Become King. He Gets Lynched.

It's A Little Embarrassing That After 45 Years Of Research & Study, The Best Advice I Can Give People Is To Be A Little Kinder To Each Other.

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

It's A Very Salutary Thing To Realize That The Rather Dull Universe In Which Most Of Us Spend Most Of Our Time Is Not The Only Universe There Is. I Think It's Healthy That People Should Have This Experience.

Which Is Better: To Have Fun With Fungi Or To Have Idiocy With Ideology, To Have Wars Because Of Words, To Have Tomorrow's Misdeeds Out Of Yesterday's Miscreeds?

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

There Is Only One Corner Of The Universe You Can Be Certain Of Improving, And That Is Your Own Self. So You Have To Begin There, Not Outside, Not On Other People. That Comes Afterwards, When You Have Worked On Your Own Corner.

The Author Of The Iliad Is Either Homer Or, If Not Homer, Somebody Else Of The Same Name.

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

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.

Democracy Can Hardly Be Expected To Flourish In Societies Where Political And Economic Power Is Being Progressively Concentrated And Centralized. But The Progress Of Technology Has Led And Is Still Leading To Just Such A Concentration And Centralization Of Power.

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.

Happiness Is Like Coke — Something You Get As A By-product In The Process Of Making Something Else.

Good Action And Thoughts Produce Consequences Which Tend To Neutralize, Or Put A Stop To, The Result Of Evil Thoughts And Actions. For As We Give Up The Life Of Self (and Note That, Like Forgiveness, Repentance And Humility Are Also Special Cases Of Giving), As We Abandon What The German Mystics Called "the I, Me, Mine," We Make Ourselves Progressively Capable Of Receiving Grace. By Grace We Are Enabled To Know Reality More Completely, And This Knowledge Of Reality Helps Us To Give Up More Of The Life Of Selfhood - And So On, In A Mounting Spiral Of Illumination And Regeneration.

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.

When One Individual Comes Into Intimate Contact With Another, She—or He, Of Course, As The Case May Be—must Almost Inevitably Receive Or Inflict Suffering.

A Child-like Man Is Not A Man Whose Development Has Been Arrested; On The Contrary, He Is A Man Who Has Given Himself A Chance Of Continuing To Develop Long After Most Adults Have Muffled Themselves In The Cocoon Of Middle-aged Habit And Convention.

When Truth Is Nothing But Truth, It's Unnatural, It's An Abstraction That Resembles Nothing In The Real World.

Higher Education Is Not Necessarily A Guarantee Of Higher Virtue.

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.

If You Have Behaved Badly, Repent, Make What Amends You Can And Address Yourself To The Task Of Behaving Better Next Time.

Brave New World

The Older Dictators Fell Because They Could Never Supply Their Subjects With Enough Bread, Enough Circuses, Enough Miracles, And Mysteries. Under A Scientific Dictatorship, Education Will Really Work' With The Result That Most Men And Women Will Grow Up To Love Their Servitude And Will Never Dream Of Revolution. There Seems To Be No Good Reason Why A Thoroughly Scientific Dictatorship Should Ever Be Overthrown.

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.

To Aspire To Be Superhuman Is A Most Discreditable Admission That You Lack The Guts, The Wit, The Moderating Judgment To Be Successfully And Consummately Human.

Words Form The Thread On Which We String Our Experiences.

The Consistent Thinker, The Consistently Moral Man, Is Either A Walking Mummy Or Else, If He Has Not Succeeded In Stifling All His Vitality, A Fanatical Monomaniac.

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

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

Literary Or Scientific, Liberal Or Specialist, All Our Education Is Predominantly Verbal And Therefore Fails To Accomplish What It Is Supposed To Do. Instead Of Transforming Children Into Fully Developed Adults, It Turns Out Students Of The Natural Sciences Who Are Completely Unaware Of Nature As The Primary Fact Of Experience, It Inflicts Upon The World Students Of The Humanities Who Know Nothing Of Humanity, Their Own Or Anyone Else's.

Intellectuals ... Regard Over-simplification As The Original Sin Of The Mind And Have No Use For The Slogans, The Unqualified Assertions And Sweeping Generalizations.

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

The Poet Is Born With The Capacity Of Arranging Words In Such A Way That Something Of The Quality Of The Graces And Inspirations He Has Received Can Make Itself Felt To Other Human Beings In The White Spaces, So To Speak, Between The Lines Of His Verse. This Is A Great And Precious Gift; But If The Poet Remains Content With His Gift, If He Persists In Worshipping The Beauty In Art And Nature Without Going On To Make Himself Capable, Through Selflessness, Of Apprehending Beauty As It Is In The Divine Ground, Then He Is Only An Idolater.

Facts Do Not Cease To Exist Because They Are Ignored.

All Gods Are Homemade, And It Is We Who Pull Their Strings, And So, Give Them The Power To Pull Ours.

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.

Thanks To Words, We Have Been Able To Rise Above The Brutes; And Thanks To Words, We Have Often Sunk To The Level Of The Demons.

If One Is Not Oneself A Sage Or Saint, The Best Thing One Can Do Is To Study The Words Of Those Who Were.

Facts Are Ventriloquist’s Dummies. Sitting On A Wise Man’s Knee They May Be Made To Utter Words Of Wisdom; Elsewhere, They Say Nothing, Or Talk Nonsense, Or Indulge In Sheer Diabolism.

I'd Rather Be Myself," He Said. "myself And Nasty. Not Somebody Else, However Jolly.

Brave New World Technology

Liberty, As We All Know, Cannot Flourish In A Country That Is Permanently On A War Footing, Or Even A Near War Footing. Permanent Crisis Justifies Permanent Control Of Everybody And Everything By The Agencies Of Central Government.

We Tend To Think And Feel In Terms Of The Art We Like; And If The Art We Like Is Bad Then Our Thinking And Feeling Will Be Bad. And If The Thinking And Feeling Of Most Of The Individuals Composing A Society Is Bad, Is Not That Society In Danger?

Man Must Learn To Simplify, But Not To The Point Of Falsification.

The Silent Bear No Witness Against Themselves.

Chaos And Ineptitude Are Anti-human; But So Too Is A Superlatively Efficient Government, Equipped With All The Products Of A Highly Developed Technology.

The Leech's Kiss, The Squid's Embrace, The Prurient Ape's Defiling Touch: And Do You Like The Human Race? No, Not Much.

Grace Is Always Sufficient, Provided We Are Ready To Cooperate With It.

Doing Your Best

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.

Generalities Are Intellectually Necessary Evils.

What A Gulf Between Impression And Expression! That’s Our Ironic Fate—to Have Shakespearean Feelings And (unless By Some Billion-to-one Chance We Happen To Be Shakespeare) To Talk About Them Like Automobile Salesmen Or Teen-agers Or College Professors. We Practice Alchemy In Reverse—touch Gold And It Turns Into Lead; Touch The Pure Lyrics Of Experience, And They Turn Into The Verbal Equivalents Of Tripe And Hogwash.

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

What The Rest Of Us See Only Under The Influence Of Mescalin, The Artist Is Congenitally Equipped To See All The Time.

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.

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.

Dying Is Almost The Least Spiritual Of Our Acts, More Strictly Carnal Even Than The Act Of Love. There Are Death Agonies That Are Like The Strainings Of The Costive At Stool.

This Concern With The Basic Condition Of Freedom -- The Absence Of Physical Constraint -- Is Unquestionably Necessary, But Is Not All That Is Necessary. It Is Perfectly Possible For A Man To Be Out Of Prison And Yet Not Free -- To Be Under No Physical Constraint And Yet To Be A Psychological Captive, Compelled To Think, Feel And Act As The Representatives Of The National State, Or Of Some Private Interest Within The Nation, Want Him To Think, Feel And Act.

Hug Me Till You Drug Me, Honey; Kiss Me Till I'm In A Coma.

Brave New World

Medical Science Is Making Such Remarkable Progress That Soon None Of Us Will Be Well.

Medical Science

One Seventh Of Your Life Is Spent On Monday.

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

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

Those Who Meant Well Behaved In The Same Way As Those Who Meant Badly.

Knowledge Is An Affair Of Symbols And Is, All Too Often, A Hindrance To Wisdom, The Uncovering Of The Self From Moment To Moment

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

The Innocence Of Those Who Grind The Faces Of The Poor, But Refrain From Pinching The Bottoms Of Their Neighbour's Wives! The Innocence Of Ford, The Innocence Of Rockefeller! The Nineteenth Century Was The Age Of Innocence--that Sort Of Innocence. With The Result That We're Now Almost Ready To Say That A Man Is Seldom More Innocently Employed Than When Making Love.

Every Civilization Is, Among Other Things, An Arrangement For Domesticating The Passions And Setting Them To Do Useful Work.

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

Brave New World

The Survival Of Democracy Depends On The Ability Of Large Numbers Of People To Make Realistic Choices In The Light Of Adequate Information.

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

Consider The Problem Of Over-population. Rapidly Mounting Human Numbers Are Pressing Ever More Heavily On Natural Resources. What Is To Be Done?... The Annual Increase Of Numbers Should Be Reduced. But How? We Are Given Two Choices -- Famine, Pestilence And War On The One Hand, Birth Control On The Other. Most Of Us Choose Birth Control.

The History Of Any Nation Follows An Undulatory Course. In The Trough Of The Wave We Find More Or Less Complete Anarchy; But The Crest Is Not More Or Less Complete Utopia, But Only, At Best, A Tolerably Humane, Partially Free And Fairly Just Society That Invariably Carries Within Itself The Seeds Of Its Own Decadence.

If You Don't Gamble, You'll Never Win.

There Will Be, In The Next Generation Or So, A Pharmacological Method Of Making People Love Their Servitude, And Producing Dictatorship Without Tears, So To Speak, Producing A Kind Of Painless Concentration Camp For Entire Societies, So That People Will In Fact Have Their Liberties Taken Away From Them, But Will Rather Enjoy It.

I Was Not Looking Now At An Unusual Flower Arrangement. I Was Seeing What Adam Had Seen On The Morning Of His Creation - The Miracle, Moment By Moment, Of Naked Existence.

One Third, More Or Less, Of All The Sorrow That The Person I Think I Am Must Endure Is Unavoidable. It Is The Sorrow Inherent In The Human Condition, The Price We Must Pay For Being Sentient And Self-conscious Organisms, Aspirants To Liberation, But Subject To The Laws Of Nature And Under Orders To Keep On Marching, Through Irreversible Time, Through A World Wholly Indifferent To Our Well-being, Toward Decrepitude And The Certainty Of Death. The Remaining Two Thirds Of All Sorrow Is Homemade And, So Far As The Universe Is Concerned, Unnecessary.

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

And That," Put In The Director Sententiously, "that Is The Secret Of Happiness And Virtue — Liking What You've Got To Do. All Conditioning Aims At That: Making People Like Their Unescapable Social Destiny.

Brave New World

No Man Ever Dared To Manifest His Boredom So Insolently As Does A Siamese Tomcat When He Yawns In The Face Of His Amorously Importunate Wife.

At Any Given Moment, Life Is Completely Senseless. But Viewed Over A Period, It Seems To Reveal Itself As An Organism Existing In Time, Having A Purpose, Trending In A Certain Direction.

The Condition Of Being Forgiven Is Self-abandonment. The Proud Man Prefers Self-reproach, However Painful --because The Reproached Self Isn't Abandoned; It Remains Intact.

We Live Together, We Act On, And React To, One Another; But Always And In All Circumstances We Are By Ourselves. [...] By Its Very Nature Every Embodied Spirit Is Doomed To Suffer And Enjoy In Solitude. Sensations, Feelings, Insights, Fancies - All These Are Private And, Except Through Symbols And At Second Hand, Incommunicable.

Sixty Two Thousand Four Hundred Repetitions Make One Truth. Idiots!

Brave New World

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

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.

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

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 .

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

To Write Fiction, One Needs A Whole Series Of Inspirations About People In An Actual Environment, And Then A Whole Lot Of Work On The Basis Of Those Inspirations.

Maybe This World Is Another Planet's Hell.

Man Is Unique In Organizing The Mass Murder Of His Own Species.

The Perennial Philosophy Is Expressed Most Succinctly In The Sanskrit Formula, Tat Tvam Asi ('that Art Thou'); The Atman, Or Immanent Eternal Self, Is One With Brahman, The Absolute Principle Of All Existence; And The Last End Of Every Human Being, Is To Discover The Fact For Himself, To Find Out Who He Really Is.

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

I Have Spoken So Far Only Of The Blissful Visionary Experience? But Visionary Experience Is Not Always Blissful. It's Sometimes Terrible. There Is Hell As Well As Heaven.

There Is Something Curiously Boring About Somebody Else's Happiness.

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

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

Slowly, Very Slowly, Like Two Unhurried Compass Needles, The Feet Turned Towards The Right; North, North-east, East, South-east, South, South-south-west; Then Paused, And After A Few Seconds, Turned As Unhurriedly Back Towards The Left. South-south-west, South, South-east, East.

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

We Are Not Our Own Any More Than What We Possess Is Our Own. We Did Not Make Ourselves, We Cannot Be Supreme Over Ourselves. We Are Not Our Own Masters.

Brave New World

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

Did You Eat Something That Didn't Agree With You?" Asked Bernard. The Savage Nodded "i Ate Civilization.

An Intellectual Is A Person Who's Found One Thing That's More Interesting Than Sex.

So Long As Men Worship The Caesars And Napoleons, Caesars And Napoleons Will Duly Arise And Make Them Miserable.

God: A Gaseous Vertebrate.

The Deepest Sin Against The Human Mind Is To Believe Things Without Evidence.

Our Conviction That The World Is Meaningless Is Due In Part To The Fact (discussed In A Later Paragraph) That The Philosophy Of Meaningless Lends Itself Very Effectively To Furthering The Ends Of Political And Erotic Passion; In Part To A Genuine Intellectual Error - The Error Of Identifying The World Of Science, A World From Which All Meaning Has Deliberately Been Excluded, With Ultimate Reality.

A Gramme Is Better Than A Damn.

We Now Spend A Good Deal More On Drink And Smoke Than We Spend On Education. This, Of Course, Is Not Surprising. The Urge To Escape From Selfhood And The Environment Is In Almost Everyone Almost All The Time.

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.

A Squat Grey Building Of Only Thirty-four Stories. Over The Main Entrance The Words, Central London Hatchery And Conditioning Centre, And, In A Shield, The World State's Motto, Community, Identity, Stability.

Books Have Their Destinies Like Men. And Their Fates, As Made By Generations Of Readers, Are Very Different From The Destinies Foreseen For Them By Their Authors. Gulliver's Travels, With A Minimum Of Expurgation, Has Become A Children's Book; A New Illustrated Edition Is Produced Every Christmas. That's What Comes Of Saying Profound Things About Humanity In Terms Of A Fairy Story.

God In The Safe And Ford On The Shelves.

Brave New World

When The Sun Rises, It Rises For Everyone.

In Life, Man Proposes, God Disposes.

Can You Say Something About Nothing?

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

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?

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 Address Yourself To The Task Of Behaving Better Next Time. On No Account Brood Over Your Wrongdoing. Rolling In The Muck Is Not The Best Way Of Getting Clean.

The Sum Of Evil, Pascal Remarked, Would Be Much Diminished If Men Could Only Learn To Sit Quietly In Their Rooms.

Every Notable Advance In Technique Or Organization Has To Be Paid For, And In Most Cases The Debit Is More Or Less Equivalent To The Credit. Except Of Course When It's More Than Equivalent, As It Has Been With Universal Education, For Example, Or Wireless, Or These Damned Aeroplanes. In Which Case, Of Course, Your Progress Is A Step Backwards And Downwards.

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

Brave New World

Several Excuses Are Always Less Convincing Than One.

Unlike The Masses, Intellectuals Have A Taste For Rationality And An Interest In Facts.

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

I Like Being Myself. Myself And Nasty.

Brave New World Happiness

The Secret Of Genius Is To Carry The Spirit Of The Child Into Old Age, Which Mean Never Losing Your Enthusiasm.

The Artists Who The World Has Always Recognized As The Greatest Are Those With The Widest Sympathy. The Greatness Of The Great Artist Depends Precisely On The Width And The Intensity Of His Sympathy.

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

There Is No Substitute For Talent. Industry And All Its Virtues Are Of No Avail.

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

Visionary Experience Is Not The Same As Mystical Experience. Mystical Experience Is Beyond The Realm Of Opposites. Visionary Experience Is Still Within That Realm. Heaven Entails Hell, And 'going To Heaven' Is No More Liberation Than Is The Descent Into Horror. Heaven Is Merely A Vantage Point From Which The Divine Ground Can Be More Clearly Seen Than On The Level Of Ordinary Individual Experience.

Mystical Experiences

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.

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

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.

Chastity - The Most Unnatural Of All The Sexual Perversions.

Jehovah, Allah, The Trinity, Jesus, Buddha, Are Names For A Great Variety Of Human Virtues, Human Mystical Experiences, Human Remorses, Human Compensatory Fantasies, Human Terrors, Human Cruelties. If All Men Were Alike, All The World Would Worship The Same God.

The Effectiveness Of Political And Religious Propaganda Depends Upon The Methods Employed, Not Upon The Doctrines Taught. These Doctrines May Be True Or False, Wholesome Or Pernicious It Makes Little Or No Difference.

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

Idealism Is The Noble Toga That Political Gentlemen Drape Over Their Will To Power.

Music Is An Ocean, But The Repertory Is Hardly Even A Lake; It Is A Pond.

Marble, I Perceive, Covers A Multitude Of Sins.

Industrial Civilization Is Only Possible When There's No Self-denial. Self-indulgence Up To The Very Limits Imposed By Hygiene And Economics. Otherwise The Wheels Stop Turning.

And No Wonder; For The New Technique Of "subliminal Projection," As It Was Called, Was Intimately Associated With Mass Entertainment, And In The Life Of Civilized Human Beings Massed Entertainment Now Plays A Part Comparable To That Played In The Middle Ages Be Religion.

Man Is Hypnotized By The Glitter Of His Own Gadgetry

We Can Only Love What We Know, And We Can Never Know Completely What We Do Not Love. Love Is A Mode Of Knowledge

In The Days Before Machinery Men And Women Who Wanted To Amuse Themselves Were Compelled, In Their Humble Way, To Be Artists. Now They Sit Still And Permit Professionals To Entertain Them By The Aid Of Machinery. It Is Difficult To Believe That General Artistic Culture Can Flourish In This Atmosphere Of Passivity.

"our Kingdom Go" Is The Necessary And Unavoidable Corollary Of 'thy Kingdom Come.' For The More There Is Self, The Less There Is Of God. The Divine Eternal Fulness Of Life Can Be Gained Only By Those Who Have Deliberately Lost The Partial, Separative Life Of Craving And Self-interest, Of Egocentric Thinking, Feeling, Wishing, And Acting.

Pageantry Is A Visionary Art Which Has Been Used, From Time Immemorial, As A Political Instrument.

The Finest Works Of Art Are Precious, Among Other Reasons, Because They Make It Possible For Us To Know, If Only Imperfectly And For A Little While, What It Actually Feels Like To Think Subtly And Feel Nobly.

For Every Traveller Who Has Any Taste Of His Own, The Only Useful Guidebook Will Be The One Which He Himself Has Written.

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

In All Activities Of Life, The Secret Of Efficiency Lies In An Ability To Combine Two Seemingly Incompatible States: A State Of Maximum Activity And A State Of Maximum Relaxation.

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.

The Mockery Made Him Feel An Outsider; And Feeling An Outsider He Behaved Like One, Which Increased The Prejudice Against Him And Intensified The Contempt And Hostility Aroused By His Physical Defects. Which In Turn Increased His Sense Of Being Alien And Alone. A Chronic Fear Of Being Slighted Made Him Avoid His Equals, Made Him Stand, Where His Inferiors Were Concerned, Self-consciously On His Dignity.

Happiness Is Never Grand.

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 Gain Made By Individuals Or Societies Is Almost Instantly Taken For Granted. The Luminous Ceiling Toward Which We Raise Our Longing Eyes Becomes, When We Have Climbed To The Next Floor, A Stretch Of Disregarded Linoleum Beneath Our Feet.

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.

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.

Everybody Strains After Happiness, And The Result Is That Nobody's Happy.

To Be Enlightened Is To Be Aware, Always, Of Total Reality In Its Immanent Otherness - To Be Aware Of It And Yet Remain In A Condition To Survive As An Animal. Our Goal Is To Discover That We Have Always Been Where We Ought To Be. Unhappily We Make The Task Exceedingly Difficult For Ourselves.

Half At Least Of All Morality Is Negative And Consists In Keeping Out Of Mischief. The Lords Prayer Is Less Than 50 Words Long, And 6 Of Those Words Are Devoted To Asking God Not To Lead Us Into Temptation.

Children Are Nowhere Taught, In Any Systematic Way, To Distinguish True From False, Or Meaningful From Meaningless, Statements. Why Is This So? Because Their Elders, Even In The Democratic Countries, Do Not Want Them To Be Given This Kind Of Education.

My Fate Cannot Be Mastered; It Can Only Be Collaborated With And Thereby, To Some Extent, Directed. Nor Am I The Captain Of My Soul; I Am Only Its Noisiest Passenger.

Men Make Use Of Their Illnesses At Least As Much As They Are Made Use Of By Them.

The Quality Of Moral Behavior Varies In Inverse Ratio To The Number Of Human Beings Involved.

Almost All Of Us Long For Peace And Freedom; But Very Few Of Us Have Much Enthusiasm For The Thoughts, Feelings, And Actions That Make For Peace And Freedom.

Words Can Be Like X-rays If You Use Them Properly -- They’ll Go Through Anything. You Read And You’re Pierced.

The Proper Study Of Mankind Is Books.

Actual Happiness Always Looks Pretty Squalid In Comparison With The Over-compensations For Misery.

Brave New World

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

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

All Right Then," Said The Savage Defiantly, "i'm Claiming The Right To Be Unhappy.

Brave New World

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

Real Progress Is Progress In Charity, All Other Advances Being Secondary Thereto.

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

From Their Experience Or From The Recorded Experience Of Others (history), Men Learn Only What Their Passions And Their Metaphysical Prejudices Allow Them To Learn.

... One Reads, Above All, To Prevent Oneself Thinking.

Asceticism, It Is Evident, Has A Double Motivation. If Men And Women Torment Their Bodies, It Is Not Only Because They Hope In This Way To Atone For Past Sins And Avoid Future Punishments; It Is Also Because They Long To Visit The Mind's Antipodes And Do Some Visionary Sightseeing.

Nothing Short Of Everything Will Really Do.

No Holiday Is Ever Anything But A Disappointment.

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