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Human Beings Act In A Great Variety Of Irrational Ways, But All Of Them Seem To Be Capable, If Given A Fair Chance, Of Making A Reasonable Choice In The Light Of Available Evidence. Democratic Institutions Can Be Made To Work Only If All Concerned Do Their Best To Impart Knowledge And To Encourage Rationality. But Today, In The World's Most Powerful Democracy, The Politicians And The Propagandists Prefer To Make Nonsense Of Democratic Procedures By Appealing Almost Exclusively To The Ignorance And Irrationality Of The Electors.

-Aldous Huxley

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Human Beings Act In

Aldous Huxley

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Human Beings Act In A Great Variety Of Irrational Ways, But All Of Them Seem To Be Capable, If Given A Fair Chance, Of Making A Reasonable Choice In The Light Of Available Evidence. Democratic Institutions Can Be Made To Work Only If All Concerned Do Their Best To Impart Knowledge And To Encourage Rationality. But Today, In The World's Most Powerful Democracy, The Politicians And The Propagandists Prefer To Make Nonsense Of Democratic Procedures By Appealing Almost Exclusively To The Ignorance And Irrationality Of The Electors.

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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.

All The Advantages Of Christianity And Alcohol; None Of Their Defects.

Brave New World

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

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.

Armaments, Universal Debt, And Planned Obsolescence - Those Are The Three Pillars Of Western Prosperity. If War, Waste, And Moneylenders Were Abolished, You'd Collapse. And While You People Are Overconsuming The Rest Of The World Sinks More And More Deeply Into Chronic Disaster.

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

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

Art And Religion, Carnivals And Saturnalia, Dancing And Listening To Oratory - All These Have Served, In H. G. Wells's Phrase, As Doors In The Wall.

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

Second Thoughts

The Charm Of History And Its Enigmatic Lesson Consist In The Fact That, From Age To Age, Nothing Changes And Yet Everything Is Completely Different.

Lying In Bed, He Would Think Of Heaven And London.

Wherever We Turn We Find That The Real Obstacles To Peace Are Human Will And Feeling, Human Convictions, Prejudices, Opinions. If We Want To Get Rid Of War We Must Get Rid First Of All Of Its Psychological Causes. Only When This Has Been Done Will The Rulers Of The Nations Even Desire To Get Rid Of The Economic And Political Causes.

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

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

Stupidity And Ignorance

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

A Whole Population Of Strangers Inhabited And Shaped That Little Body, Lived In That Mind And Controlled Its Wishes, Dictated Its Thoughts...the Name Was An Abstraction, A Title Arbitrarily Given, Like "france" Or "england," To A Collection, Never Long The Same, Of Many Individuals Who Were Born, Lived, And Died Within Him, As The Inhabitants Of A Country Appear And Disappear, But Keep Alive In Their Passage The Identity Of The Nation To Which They Belong.

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.

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?

Art, I Suppose, Is Only For Beginners, Who Have Made Up In Their Minds To Be Content With Symbols Rather Than With What They Signify, With The Elegantly Composed Recipe In Lieu Of Actual Dinner.

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.

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.

All Urbanization, Pushed Beyond A Certain Point, Automatically Becomes Suburbanization.... Every Great City Is Just A Collection Of Suburbs. Its Inhabitantsdo Not Live In Their City; They Merely Inhabit It.

So Now You Can Let Go, My Darling...let Go...let Go Of This Poor Old Body. You Don't Need It Anymore. Let It Fall Away From You. Leave It Lying There Like A Pile Of Worn-out Clothes...go On, My Darling, Go On Into The Light, Into The Peace, Into The Living Peace Of The Clear Light.

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

Great Is Truth, But Still Greater, From A Practical Point Of View, Is Silence About Truth. By Simply Not Mentioning Certain Subjects... Totalitarian Propagandists Have Influenced Opinion Much More Effectively Than They Could Have By The Most Eloquent Denunciations.

A Majority Of Young People Seem To Develop Mental Arteriosclerosis Forty Years Before They Get The Physical Kind.

When Life Appears To Be Working Against You, When Your Luck Is Down, When The Supposedly Wrong People Show Up, Or When You Slip Up And Return To Old, Self-defeating Habits, Recognize The Signs That You're Out Of Harmony With Intention.

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

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.

The Social Body Persists Although The Component Cells May Change.

All Democracies Are Based On The Proposition That Power Is Very Dangerous And That It Is Extremely Important Not To Let Any One Person Or Small Group Have Too Much Power For Too Long A Time

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

Brave New World

We Are All Geniuses Up To The Age Of Ten.

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.

Medical Science Has Made Such Tremendous Progress That There Is Hardly A Healthy Human Left.

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

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

Liberties Are Not Given, They Are Taken.

The Nature Of Power Is Such That Even Those Who Have Not Sought It, But Have Had It Forced Upon Them, Tend To Acquire A Taste For More.

But Every One Belongs To Every One Else

Brave New World

Brave New World John

Brave New World Technology

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.

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

No Holiday Is Ever Anything But A Disappointment.

It Is Because We Don't Know Who We Are, Because We Are Unaware That The Kingdom Of Heaven Is Within Us, That We Behave In The Generally Silly, The Often Insane, The Sometimes Criminal Ways That Are So Characteristically Human. We Are Saved, We Are Liberated And Enlightened, By Perceiving The Hitherto Unperceived Good That Is Already Within Us, By Returning To Our Eternal Ground And Remaining Where, Without Knowing It, We Have Always Been.

Individual Insanity Is Immune To The Consequences Of Collective Insanity

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

One Believes Things Because One Has Been Conditioned To Believe Them. Finding Bad Reasons For What One Believes For Other Bad Reasons-that's Philosophy. People Believe In God Because They've Been Conditioned To Believe In God.

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.

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

Good Intentions

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

I Know Very Dimly When I Start What's Going To Happen. I Just Have A Very General Idea, And Then The Thing Develops As I Write.

The Goal In Life Is To Discover That You’ve Always Been Where You Were Supposed To Be.

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

Today We Are Faced, I Think, With The Approach Of What May Be Called The Ultimate Revolution, The Final Revolution, Where Man Can Act Directly On The Mind-body Of His Fellows.

The Effects Which Follow Too Constant And Intense A Concentration Upon Evil Are Always Disastrous. Those Who Crusade, Not For God In Themselves, But Against The Devil In Others, Never Succeed In Making The World Better, But Leave It Either As It Was, Or Sometimes Even Perceptibly Worse Than It Was, Before The Crusade Began. By Thinking Primarily Of Evil We Tend, However Excellent Our Intentions, To Create Occasions For Evil To Manifest Itself.

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

By Comparison With A Night-club, Churches Are Positively Gay.

You Shall Know The Truth, And The Truth Shall Make You Mad.

Sons Have Always A Rebellious Wish To Be Disillusioned By That Which Charmed Their Fathers.

Most Loverspicture To Themselves, In Their Mistresses, A Secret Reality, Beyond And Different From What They See Every Day. They Are In Love With Somebody Else--their Own Invention. And Sometimes There Is A Secret Reality; And Sometimes Reality And Appearance Are The Same. The Discovery, In Either Case, Is Likely To Cause A Shock.

Liberate Yourselves From Everything You Know And Look With Complete Innocence At This Infinitely Improbable Thing Before You.

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.

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

Doors Of Perception

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.

The Creation By Word-power Of Something Out Of Nothing--what Is That But Magic? And, May I Add, What Is That But Literature?

The Inconveniences And Horrors Of The Pox Are Perfectly Well Known To Every One; But Still The Disease Flourishes And Spreads. Several Million People Were Killed In A Recent War And Half The World Ruined; But We All Busily Go On In Courses That Make Another Event Of The Same Sort Inevitable. Experientia Docet? Experientia Doesn't.

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

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.

That We Are Not Much Sicker And Much Madder Than We Are Is Due Exclusively To That Most Blessed And Blessing Of All Natural Graces, Sleep.

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.

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

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

There Are Few Who Would Not Rather Be Taken In Adultery Than In Provocation.

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

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.

Modern Man No Longer Regards Nature As In Any Sense Divine And Feels Perfectly Free To Behave Toward Her As An Overweening Conqueror And Tyrant.

Words Are Good Servants But Bad Masters.

Man Is Hypnotized By The Glitter Of His Own Gadgetry

To See Ourselves As Others See Us Is A Most Salutary Gift. Hardly Less Important Is The Capacity To See Others As They See Themselves.

And Along With Indifference To Space, There Was An Even More Complete Indifference To Time. "there Seems To Be Plenty Of It", Was All I Would Answer When The Investigator Asked Me To Say What I Felt About Time. Plenty Of It, But Exactly How Much Was Entirely Irrelevant. I Could, Of Course, Have Looked At My Watch But My Watch I Knew Was In Another Universe. My Actual Experience Had Been, Was Still, Of An Indefinite Duration. Or Alternatively, Of A Perpetual Present Made Up Of One Continually Changing Apocalypse.

It Is Delightful To Read On The Spot The Impressions And Opinions Of Tourists Who Visited A Hundred Years Ago, In The Vehicles And With The Aesthetic Prejudices Of The Period, The Places Which You Are Visiting Now. The Voyage Ceases To Be A Mere Tour Through Space; You Travel Through Time And Thought As Well.

Too Much Consistency Is As Bad For The Mind As For The Body.

People Often Ask Me What Is The Most Effective Technique For Transforming Their Life. It Is A Little Embarrassing That After Years And Years Of Research And Experimentation, I Have To Say That The Best Answer Is - Just Be A Little Kinder.

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.

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.

For Some Strange Reason Murder Has Always Seemed More Respectable Than Fornication. Few People Are Shocked When They Hear God Described As The God Of Battles; But What An Outcry There Would Be If Anyone Spoke Of Him As The God Of Brothels.

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.

The Flower Of The Present Rosily Blossomed.

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

There's Only One Effectively Redemptive Sacrifice, The Sacrifice Of Self-will To Make Room For The Knowledge Of God.

The Snapshots Had Become Almost As Dim As Memories.

Indifference To All The Refinements Of Life--it's Really Shocking. Just Calvinism, That's All. Calvinism Without The Excuse Of Calvin's Theology.

The Poet's Place, It Seems To Me, Is With The Mr. Hydes Of Human Nature.

Thought Of The Incomprehensible Sequence Of Changes And Chances That Make Up A Life, All The Beauties And Horrors And Absurdities Whose Conjunctions Create The Uninterpretable And Yet Divinely Significant Pattern Of Human Destiny.

He Had Been Making An Unsuccessful Effort To Write Something About Nothing In Particular

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

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.

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.

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.

Words Play An Enormous Part In Our Lives And Are Therefore Deserving Of The Closest Study.

Something That Had Been A Single Cell, A Cluster Of Cells, A Little Sac Of Tissue, A Kind Of Worm, A Potential Fish With Gills, Stirred In Her Womb And Would One Day Become A Man--a Grown Man, Suffering And Enjoying, Loving And Hating, Thinking, Remembering, Imagining. And What Had Been A Blob Of Jelly Within Her Body Would Invent A God And Worship; What Had Been A Kind Of Fish Would Create, And, Having Created, Would Become The Battleground Of Disputing Good And Evil; What Had Blindly Lived In Her As A Parasitic Worm Would Look At The Stars, Would Listen To Music, Would Read Poetry.

One Cubic Centimeter Cures Ten Gloomy Sentiments.

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.

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.

If You Want To Write, Keep Cats.

Morality Is Always The Product Of Terror; Its Chains And Strait-waistcoats Are Fashioned By Those Who Dare Not Trust Others, Because They Dare Not Trust Themselves, To Walk In Liberty.

I Like Being Myself. Myself And Nasty.

Brave New World Happiness

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.

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.

But Then Every Man Is Ludicrous If You Look At Him From Outside, Without Taking Into Account What’s Going On In His Heart And Mind.

Primroses And Landscapes, He Pointed Out, Have One Grave Defect: They Are Gratuitous. A Love Of Nature Keeps No Factories Busy. It Was Decided To Abolish The Love Of Nature, At Any Rate Among The Lower Classes. . . . It Was Essential That They Should Keep On Going To The Country, Even Though They Hated It.

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

A Life-worshipper's Philosophy Is Comprehensive. He Is At One Moment A Positivist And At Another A Mystic: Now Haunted By The Thought Of Death And Now A Dionysian Child Of Nature; Now A Pessimist And Now, With A Change Of Lover Or Liver Or Even The Weather, An Exuberant Believer That God's In His Heaven And All's Right With The World.

Drinking Can Not Be Sacramentalised Except In Religions Which Set No Store On Decorum. The Worship Of Dionysos Or The Celtic God Of Beer Was A Loud And Disorderly Affair.

Champagne Had The Taste Of An Apple Peeled With A Steel Knife.

Isn't It Remarkable How Everyone Who Knew [d.h.] Lawrence Has Felt Compelled To Write About Him? Why, He's Had More Books Written About Him Than Any Writer Since Byron!

Great Is Truth, But Still Greater, From A Practical Point Of View, Is Silence About Truth.

Brave New World

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

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

The Traveller's-eye View Of Men And Women Is Not Satisfying. A Man Might Spend His Life In Trains And Restaurants And Know Nothing Of Humanity At The End. To Know, One Must Be An Actor As Well As A Spectator.

All Our Science Is Just A Cookery Book, With An Orthodox Theory Of Cooking That Nobody's Allowed To Question, And A List Of Recipes That Mustn't Be Added To Except By Special Permission From The Head Cook.

God In The Safe And Ford On The Shelves.

Brave New World

What I May Call The Messages Of Brave New World, But It Is Possible To Make People Contented With Their Servitude. I Think This Can Be Done. I Think It Has Been Done In The Past. I Think It Could Be Done Even More Effectively Now Because You Can Provide Them With Bread And Circuses And You Can Provide Them With Endless Amounts Of Distractions And Propaganda.

Brave New World

Man Is An Intelligence In Servitude To His Organs.

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

It Takes A Certain Amount Of Intelligence And Imagination To Realize The Extraordinary Queerness And Mysteriousness Of The World In Which We Live.

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.

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

... The Greater Part Of The Population Is Not Very Intelligent, Dreads Responsibility, And Desires Nothing Better Than To Be Told What To Do. Provided The Rulers Do Not Interfere With Its Material Comforts And Its Cherished Beliefs, It Is Perfectly Happy To Let Itself Be Ruled.

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.

One Of The Great Attractions Of Patriotism

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

Perhaps Dirt Is The Necessary Condition Of Beauty.... Perhaps Hygiene And Art Can Never Be Bedfellows. No Verdi, After All, Without Spitting Into Trumpets. No Duse Without A Crowd Of Malodorous Bourgeois Giving One Another Their Coryzas. And Think Of The Inexpugnable Retreats For Microbes Prepared By Michelangelo In The Curls Of Moses' Beard!

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.

The More A Man Knows About Himself In Relation To Every Kind Of Experience, The Greater His Chance Of Suddenly, One Fine Morning, Realizing Who In Fact He Is.

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

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

Meaninglessness

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.

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

Seated Upon The Convex Mound Of One Vast Kidney, Jonah Prays And Sings His Canticles And Hymns, Making The Hollow Vault Resound God's Goodness And Mysterious Ways, Till The Great Fish Spouts Music As He Swims.

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

In The World Of Ideas Everything Was Clear; In Life All Was Obscure, Embroiled.

If We Must Play The Theological Game, Let Us Never Forget That It Is A Game. Religion, It Seems To Me, Can Survive Only As A Consciously Accepted System Of Make-believe.

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

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

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

There Was A Thing Called Heaven; But All The Same They Used To Drink Enormous Quantities Of Alcohol.

Enormous Quantities

The Brotherhood Of Men Does Not Imply Their Equality. Families Have Their Fools And Their Men Of Genius, Their Black Sheep And Their Saints, Their Worldly Successes And Their Worldly Failures. A Man Should Treat His Brothers Lovingly And With Justice, According To The Deserts Of Each. But The Deserts Of Every Brother Are Not The Same.

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.

The Proper Study Of Mankind Is Books.

But Then People Don't Read Literature In Order To Understand; They Read It Because They Want To Re-live The Feelings And Sensations Which They Found Exciting In The Past. Art Can Be A Lot Of Things; But In Actual Practice, Most Of It Is Merely The Mental Equivalent Of Alcohol And Cantharides.

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

Each Person Is At Each Moment Capable Of Remembering All That Has Ever Happened To Him And Of Perceiving Everything That Is Happening Everywhere In The Universe.

Doors Of Perception

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

Thought Is Barred In This City Of Dreadful Joy And Conversation Is Unknown.

The Spiritual Journey Does Not Consist Of Arriving At A New Destination Where A Person Gains What He Did Not Have, Or Becomes What He Is Not. It Consists In The Dissipation Of One's Own Ignorance Concerning Oneself And Life, And The Gradual Growth Of That Understanding Which Begins The Spiritual Awakening. The Finding Of God Is A Coming To One?s Self.

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

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.

Chastity - The Most Unnatural Of All The Sexual Perversions.

Maybe This World Is Another Planet's Hell.

Children Are Remarkable For Their Intelligence And Ardor, For Their Curiosity, Their Intolerance Of Shams, The Clarity And Ruthlessness Of Their Vision.

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

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

There Are So Many Intellectual And Moral Angels Battling For Rationalism, Good Citizenship, And Pure Spirituality; So Many And Such Eminent Ones, So Very Vocal And Authoritative! The Poor Devil In Man Needs All The Support And Advocacy He Can Get. The Artist Is His Natural Champion. When An Artist Deserts To The Side Of The Angels, It Is The Most Odious Of Treasons.

For The First Time In The History Of The World, Buddhism Proclaimed A Salvation Which Each Individual Could Gain From Him Or Herself, In This World, During This Life, Without Any Least Reference To God, Or To Gods Either Great Or Small.

The Real Hopeless Victims Of Mental Illness Are To Be Found Among Those Who Appear To Be Most Normal. Many Of Them Are Normal Because They Are So Well Adjusted To Our Mode Of Existence, Because Their Human Voice Has Been Silenced So Early In Their Lives That They Do Not Even Struggle Or Suffer Or Develop Symptoms As The Neurotic Does. They Are Normal Not In What May Be Called The Absolute Sense Of The Word; They Are Normal Only In Relation To A Profoundly Abnormal Society.

That’s What The Human Brain Is There For—to Turn The Chaos Of Given Experience Into A Set Of Manageable Symbols. Sometimes The Symbols Correspond Fairly Closely To Some Of The Aspects Of The External Reality Behind Our Experience; Then You Have Science And Common Sense. Sometimes, On The Contrary, The Symbols Have Almost No Connection With External Reality; Then You Have Paranoia And Delirium. More Often There’s A Mixture, Part Realistic And Part Fantastic; That’s Religion.

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.

The Humanity Of Men And Women Is Inversely Proportional To Their Numbers. A Crowd Is No More Human Than An Avalanche Or A Whirlwind. A Rabble Of Men And Women Stands Lower In The Scale Of Moral And Intellectual Being Than A Herd Of Swine Or Of Jackals.

If Human Beings Were Shown What They're Really Like, They'd Either Kill One Another As Vermin, Or Hang Themselves.

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.

Every Significant Artist Is A Metaphysician, A Propounder Of Beauty-truths And Form-theories.

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.

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.

A Poor Degenerate From The Ape, Whose Hands Are Four, Whose Tail's A Limb, I Contemplate My Flaccid Shape And Know I May Not Rival Him Save With My Mind.

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.

Cleanliness Is Next To Fordliness.

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.

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

Can We Unite Against Ourselves For Our Own Higher Interest?

Most Of One's Life Is One Prolonged Effort To Prevent Oneself Thinking.

You Can't Make Flivers Without Steel - And You Can't Make Tragedies Without Social Instability. The World's Stable Now. People Are Happy; They Get What They Want, And They Never Want What They Can't Get. They're Well Off; They're Safe; They're Never Ill; They're Not Afraid Of Death; They're Blissfully Ignorant Of Passion And Old Age; They're Plagued With No Mothers Or Fathers; They've Got No Wives, Or Children, Or Lovers To Feel Strongly About; They're So Conditioned That They Pratically Can't Help Behaving As They Ought To Behave.

Who Lives Longer? The Man Who Takes Heroin For Two Years And Dies, Or A Man Who Lives On Roast Beef, Water And Potatoes 'till 95? One Passes His 24 Months In Eternity. All The Years Of The Beefeater Are Lived Only In Time.

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.

Peace Is A Necessary Condition Of Spirituality, No Less Than An Inevitable Result Of It.

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

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.

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

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

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

Doing Your Best

The Instinct Of Acquisitiveness Has More Perverts, I Believe, Than The Instinct Of Sex. At Any Rate, People Seem To Me Odder About Money Than About Even Their Amours.

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.

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.

I Used To Think I Had No Will To Power. Now I Perceive That I Vented It On Thoughts, Rather Than People. Conquering An Unknown Province Of Knowledge. Getting The Better Of A Problem. Forcing Ideas To Associate Or Come Apart. Bullying Recalcitrant Words To Assume A Certain Pattern. All The Fun Of Being A Dictator Without Any Risks And Responsibilities.

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

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.

Words Form The Thread On Which We String Our Experiences.

From The Internal Reality, By Which I Means The Totality Of Psychological Experiences, It [science] Actually Separates Us. Art, For Example, Deals With Many More Aspects Of This Internal Reality Than Does Science, Which Confines Itself Deliberately And By Convention To The Study Of One Very Limited Class Of Experiences The Experiences Of Sense.

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

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