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Man Is So Intelligent That He Feels Impelled To Invent Theories To Account For What Happens In The World. Unfortunately, He Is Not Quite Intelligent Enough, In Most Cases, To Find Correct Explanations. So That When He Acts On His Theories, He Behaves Very Often Like A Lunatic.

-Aldous Huxley

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Man Is So Intelligent

Aldous Huxley

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Man Is So Intelligent That He Feels Impelled To Invent Theories To Account For What Happens In The World. Unfortunately, He Is Not Quite Intelligent Enough, In Most Cases, To Find Correct Explanations. So That When He Acts On His Theories, He Behaves Very Often Like A Lunatic.

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

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Experience Is Not What Happens To You; It's What You Do With What Happens To You.

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Experience Teaches Only The Teachable.

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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.

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

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

Man Is So Intelligent That He Feels Impelled To Invent Theories To Account For What Happens In The World. Unfortunately, He Is Not Quite Intelligent Enough, In Most Cases, To Find Correct Explanations. So That When He Acts On His Theories, He Behaves Very Often Like A Lunatic.

Civilization Means Food And Literature All Round. Beefsteaks And Fiction Magazines For All. First-class Proteins For The Body, Fourth-class Love-stories For The Spirit.

What Man Has Joined, Nature Is Powerless To Put Asunder.

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Brave New World John

To His Dog, Every Man Is Napoleon; Hence The Constant Popularity Of Dogs.

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

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

The More You Know, The More You See

Conversations With God

How Difficult It Is To Sound Persuasive At The Top Of One's Voice!

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.

In The Course Of History Many More People Have Died For Their Drink And Their Dope Than Have Died For Their Religion Or Their Country.

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.

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.

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

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The Victim Of Mind-manipulation Does Not Know That He Is A Victim. To Him, The Walls Of His Prison Are Invisible, And He Believes Himself To Be Free.

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

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Chastity - The Most Unnatural Of All The Sexual Perversions.

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

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

These Are The Sort Of Things People Ought To Look At. Things Without Pretensions, Satisfied To Be Merely Themselves.

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!]

Amour Is The One Human Activity Of Any Importance In Which Laughter And Pleasure Preponderate, If Ever So Slightly, Over Misery And Pain.

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

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

To Be Shaken Out Of The Ruts Of Ordinary Perception, To Be Shown For A Few Timeless Hours The Outer And The Inner World, Not As They Appear To An Animal Obsessed With Words And Notions, But As They Are Apprehended, Directly And Unconditionally, By Mind At Large-this Is The Experience Of Inestimable Value To Everyone.

God In The Safe And Ford On The Shelves.

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

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

When People Are Suspicious With You, You Start Being Suspicious With Them.

Brave New World Happiness

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

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

The Vast Majority Of Human Beings Are Not Interested In Reason Or Satisfied With What It Teaches.

What Drivel It All Is!... A String Of Words Called Religion. Another String Of Words Called Philosophy. Half A Dozen Other Stringscalled Political Ideals. And All The Words Either Ambiguous Or Meaningless. And People Getting So Excited About Them They'll Murder Their Neighbours For Using A Word They Don't Happen To Like. A Word That Probably Doesn't Mean As Much As A Good Belch. Just A Noise Without Even The Excuse Of Gas On The Stomach.

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

I Know The Outer World As Well As You Do, And I Judge It. You Know Nothing Of My Inner World, And Yet You Presume To Judge That World.

What Is Absurd And Monstrous About War Is That Men Who Have No Personal Quarrel Should Be Trained To Murder One Another In Cold Blood.

I Met, Not Long Ago, A Young Man Who Aspired To Become A Novelist. Knowing That I Was In The Profession, He Asked Me To Tell Him How He Should Set To Work To Realize His Ambition. I Did My Best To Explain. 'the First Thing,' I Said, 'is To Buy Quite A Lot Of Paper, A Bottle Of Ink, And A Pen. After That You Merely Have To Write.'

I Want To Know What Passion Is. I Want To Feel Something Strongly.

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

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.

Several Excuses Are Always Less Convincing Than One.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

All War Propaganda Consists, In The Last Resort, In Substituting Diabolical Abstractions For Human Beings. Similarly, Those Who Defend War Have Invented A Pleasant Sounding Vocabulary Of Abstractions In Which To Describe The Process Of Mass Murder.

... 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.

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

Most Kings And Priests Have Been Despotic, And All Religions Have Been Riddled With Superstition.

Hinduism The Perennial Philosophy That Is At The Core Of All Religions.

Can You Say Something About Nothing?

Words Form The Thread On Which We String Our Experiences.

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Dennis Kucinich

Lion Feuchtwanger

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