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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.

-Aldous Huxley

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Nobody Needs To Go

Aldous Huxley

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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.

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Well... ...that's What You Always Forget, Isn't It? I Mean, You Forget To Pay Attention To What's Happening. And That's The Same As Not Being Here And Now.

Facts Do Not Cease To Exist Because They Are Ignored.

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.

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.

Round Pegs In Square Holes Tend To Have Dangerous Thoughts About The Social System And Tend To Infect Others With Their Discontents.

The Social Body Persists Although The Component Cells May Change.

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.

Pleasure Cannot Be Shared; Like Pain, It Can Only Be Experienced Or Inflicted, And When We Give Pleasure To Our Lovers Or Bestow Charity Upon The Needy, We Do So, Not To Gratify The Object Of Our Benevolence, But Only Ourselves. For The Truth Is That We Are Kind For The Same Reason As We Are Cruel, In Order That We May Enhance The Sense Of Our Own Power.

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.

The Worst Enemy Of Life, Freedom And The Common Decencies Is Total Anarchy; Their Second Worst Enemy Is Total Efficiency.

A Man Can Smile And Smile And Be A Villain.

Hamlet And Ophelia

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

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

Everyone Who Wants To Do Good To The Human Race Always Ends In Universal Bullying.

One Right-thinking Man Thinks Like All Other Right-thinking Men Of His Time That Is To Say, In Most Cases, Like Some Wrong-thinking Man Of Another Time.

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.

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

The More Stitches, The Less Riches.

Brave New World

The Lion Will Lay Down With The Lamb...but Every Morning They'll Have To Provide A New Lamb. Maybe This World Is Another Planet's Hell.

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.

All That Is Needed Is Money And A Candidate Who Can Be Coached To Look Sincere. Political Principles And Plans For Specific Action Have Come To Lose Most Of Their Importance. The Personality Of The Candidate, The Way He Is Projected By The Advertising Experts, Are The Things That Really Matter.

The Flower Of The Present Rosily Blossomed.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

The Place Is Good. How Good, One Must Have Circumnavigated The Globe To Discover. Why Not Stay? Take Root? But Roots Are Chains. I Have A Terror Of Losing My Freedom. Free, Without Ties, Unpossessed By Any Possessions, Free To Do As One Will, To Go At A Moment's Notice Wherever The Fancy May Suggest--it Is Good. But So Is This Place. Might It Not Be Better? To Gain Freedom One Sacrifices Something [...] And All That These Things And People Signify. One Sacrifices Something--for A Greater Gain In Knowledge, In Understanding, In Intensified Living? I Sometimes Wonder.

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.

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

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

Second Thoughts

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.

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.

The Silent Bear No Witness Against Themselves.

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.

Thought Must Be Divided Against Itself Before It Can Come To Any Knowledge Of Itself.

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.

The Vast Majority Of Human Beings Dislike And Even Actually Dread All Notions With Which They Are Not Familiar... Hence It Comes About That At Their First Appearance Innovators Have Generally Been Persecuted, And Always Derided As Fools And Madmen.

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

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

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.

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.

It Isn’t Only Art That Is Incompatible With Happiness, It’s Also Science. Science Is Dangerous, We Have To Keep It Most Carefully Chained And Muzzled.

Brave New World Happiness

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.

Orthodoxy Is The Diehard Of The World Of Thought. It Learns Not, Neither Can It Forget.

In The Contexts Of Religion And Politics, Words Are Not Regarded As Standing, Rather Inadequately, For Things And Events; On The Contrary Things And Events Are Regarded As Particular Illustrations Of Words.

Religion And Politics

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

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

I Wanted To Change The World. But I Have Found That The Only Thing One Can Be Sure Of Changing Is Oneself.

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

Brave New World

Along This Particular Stretch Of Line No Express Had Ever Passed. All The Trains--the Few That There Were--stopped At All The Stations. Denis Knew The Names Of Those Stations By Heart. Bole, Tritton, Spavin Delawarr, Knipswich For Timpany, West Bowlby, And, Finally, Camlet-on-the-water.

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

You Got Rid Of Them. Yes, That’s Just Like You. Getting Rid Of Everything Unpleasant Instead Of Learning To Put Up With It. Whether ‘tis Better In The Mind To Suffer The Slings And Arrows Of Outrageous Fortune, Or To Take Arms Against A Sea Of Troubles And By Opposing End Them… But You Don’t Do Either. Neither Suffer Nor Oppose. You Just Abolish The Slings And Arrows. It’s Too Easy.

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.

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

Happiness Is A Hard Master, Particularly Other People's Happiness.

Complete Prohibition Of All Chemical Mind Changers Can Be Decreed, But Cannot Be Enforced, And Tends To Create More Evils Than It Cures.

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.

Ironically Enough, The Only People Who Can Hold Up Indefinitely Under The Stress Of Modern War Are Psychotics. Individual Insanity Is Immune To The Consequences Of Collective Insanity.

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

I Had Motives For Not Wanting The World To Have Meaning; Consequently Assumed That It Had None, And Was Able Without Any Difficulty To Find Satisfying Reasons For This Assumption ... For Myself, As No Doubt, For Most Of My Contemporaries, The Philosophy Of Meaninglessness Was Essentially An Instrument Of Liberation. The Liberation We Desired Was Simultaneous Liberation From A Certain Political And Economic System, And Liberation From A Certain System Of Morality. We Objected To The Morality Because It Interfered With Our Sexual Freedom.

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.

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.

After Silence, That Which Comes Nearest To Expressing The Inexpressible Is Music.

Katy Was Neither A Methodist Nor A Masochist. She Was A Goddess And The Silence Of Goddesses Is Genuinely Golden. None Of Your Superficial Plating. A Solid, Twenty-two-carat Silence All The Way Through. The Olympian's Trap Is Kept Shut, Not By An Act Of Willed Discretion, But Because There's Really Nothing To Say. Goddesses Are All Of One Piece. There's No Internal Conflict In Them. Whereas The Lives Of People Like You And Me Are One Long Argument. Desires On One Side, Woodpeckers On The Other. Never A Moment Of Real Silence.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Ending Is Better Than Mending.

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.

Generalities Are Intellectually Necessary Evils.

God: A Gaseous Vertebrate.

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.

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.

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.

Every Ceiling, When Reached, Becomes A Floor, Upon Which One Walks As A Matter Of Course And Prescriptive Right

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

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

We Can't Allow Science To Undo Its Own Good Work.

Brave New World John

Brave New World Technology

Sleep Is The Most Blessed And Blessing Of All Natural Graces.

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

The More You Know, The More You See

Conversations With God

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

Perhaps It's Good For One To Suffer. Can An Artist Do Anything If He's Happy? Would He Ever Want To Do Anything? What Is Art, After All, But A Protest Against The Horrible Inclemency Of Life?

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

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

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.

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.

Most Vices Demand Considerable Self-sacrifices. There Is No Greater Mistake Than To Suppose That A Vicious Life Is A Life Of Uninterrupted Pleasure. It Is A Life Almost As Wearisome And Painful -- If Strenuously Led -- As Christian's In The Pilgrim's Progress.

... 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.

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

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

Brave New World

Being Cared For When One Is Dead Is Less Satisfactory Than Being Cared For When One Is Alive.

When An Artist Deserts To The Side Of The Angels, It Is The Most Odious Of Treasons.

Some Of The Greatest Advances In Mathematics Have Been Due To The Invention Of Symbols, Which It Afterwards Became Necessary To Explain; From The Minus Sign Proceeded The Whole Theory Of Negative Quantities.

Religion Is Always A Patron Of The Arts, But Its Taste Is By No Means Impeccable.

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.

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

I'm Pretty Good At Inventing Phrases - You Know, The Sort Of Words That Suddenly Make You Jump, Almost As Though You'd Sat On A Pin, They Seem So New And Exciting Even Though They're About Something Hypnopaedically* Obvious. But That Doesn't Seem Enough. It's Not Enough For The Phrases To Be Good; What You Make With Them Ought To Be Good Too.

De Sade Is The One Completely Consistent And Thoroughgoing Revolutionary Of History.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

One Thinks One's Something Unique And Wonderful At The Center Of The Universe, When In Fact One's Just A Slight Interruption In The Ongoing March Of Entropy.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Enormous Quantities

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.

To Be Excited Is Still To Be Unsatisfied.

One Of The Great Triumphs Of The Nineteenth Century Was To Limit The Connotation Of The Word "immoral" In Such A Way That, For Practical Purposes, Only Those Were Immoral Who Drank Too Much Or Made Too Copious Love. Those Who Indulged In Any Or All Of The Other Deadly Sins Could Look Down In Righteous Indignation On The Lascivious And The Gluttonous.... In The Name Of All Lechers And Boozers I Most Solemnly Protest Against The Invidious Distinction Made To Our Prejudice.

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.

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.

[i Am Not] The Captain Of My Soul; I Am Only Its Noisiest Passenger.

Fate And Destiny

Every Individual Is At Once The Beneficiary And The Victim Of The Linguistic Tradition Into Which He Has Been Born.

Maybe This World Is Another Planet's Hell.

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

Unless We Choose To Decentralize And To Use Applied Science, Not As The End To Which Human Beings Are To Be Made The Means, But As The Means To Producing A Race Of Free Individuals, We Have Only Two Alternatives To Choose From: Either A Number Of National

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

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.'

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

If The Prince Of Peace Should Come To Earth, One Of The First Things He Would Do Would Be To Put Psychiatrists In Their Place.

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

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.

What’s The Point Of Truth Or Beauty Or Knowledge When Anthrax Bombs Are Popping All Around You?

Brave New World

Every Man's Memory Is His Private Literature.

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.

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

Feasts Must Be Solemn And Rare, Or Else They Cease To Be Feasts.

To Travel Is To Discover That Everybody Is Wrong. The Philosophies, The Civilizations Which Seem, At A Distance, So Superior To Those Current At Home, All Prove On A Close Inspection To Be In Their Own Way Just As Hopelessly Imperfect.

The Man Who Has Successfully Solved The Problem Of His Relations With The Two Worlds Of Data And Symbols Is A Man Who Has No Beliefs. With Regard To The Problems Of Practical Life He Entertains A Series Of Working Hypotheses, Which Serve His Purposes, But Are Taken No More Seriously Than Any Other Kind Of Tool Or Instrument. In Other Words, Symbols Should Never Be Raised To The Rank Of Dogmas, Nor Should Any System Be Regarded As More Than A Provisional Convenience.

Words Form The Thread On Which We String Our Experiences.

My Father Considered A Walk Among The Mountains As The Equivalent Of Churchgoing.

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

We Cannot Reason Ourselves Out Of Our Basic Irrationality. All We Can Do Is To Learn The Art Of Being Irrational In A Reasonable Way.

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

I Like Being Myself. Myself And Nasty.

Brave New World Happiness

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

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

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

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

"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.

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

The Ductless Glands Secrete Among Other Things Our Moods, Our Aspirations, Our Philosophy Of Life.

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

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

Why Should Human Females Become Sterile In Their Forties, While Female Crocodiles Continue To Lay Eggs Into Their Third Century?

...wordless Conditioning Is Crude And Wholesale; Cannot Bring Home The Finer Distinctions, Cannot Inculcate The More Complex Courses Of Behavior. For That There Must Be Words, But Words Without Reason... Not So Much Like Drops Of Water, Though Water, It Is True, Can Wear Holes In The Hardest Granite; Rather, Drops Of Liquid Sealing-wax, Drops That Adhere, Encrust, Incorporate Themselves With What They Fall On, Till Finally The Rock Is All One Scarlet Blob.

Parodies And Caricatures Are The Most Penetrating Of Criticisms.

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.

If Most Of Us Remain Ignorant Of Ourselves, It Is Because Self-knowledge Is Painful And We Prefer The Pleasures Of Illusion.

The Natural Rhythm Of Human Life Is Routine Punctuated By Orgies.

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.

At This Point We Find Ourselves Confronted By A Very Disquieting Question: Do We Really Wish To Act Upon Our Knowledge?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

A Democracy Which Makes Or Even Effectively Prepares For Modern, Scientific War Must Necessarily Cease To Be Democratic. No Country Can Be Really Well Prepared For Modern War Unless It Is Governed By A Tyrant, At The Head Of A Highly Trained And Perfectly Obedient Bureaucracy.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

‎"but That's The Price We Have To Pay For Stability. You've Got To Choose Between Happiness And What People Used To Call High Art. We've Sacrificed The High Art.

Brave New World

War Is Often Described As A Law Of Nature-this Is Not True: Among The Lower Animals, War Is Unknown.

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

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

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

Nothing Short Of Everything Will Really Do.

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.

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.

Man Has An Almost Infinite Capacity For Taking Things And People For Granted And Thereby Missing Out On The Pleasure Of Being Grateful That Things Aren't Worse And Of Praising And Thereby Lifting The Spirits Of Others.

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.

Proportion ... You Can't Help Thinking About It In These London Streets, Where It Doesn't Exist ... It's Like Listening To A Symphony Of Cats To Walk Along Them. Senseless Discords And A Horrible Disorder All The Way ... We Need No Barbarians From Outside; They're On The Premises, All The 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.

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.

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

Brave New World

Brave New World John

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.

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.

Words, Words, Words! They Shut One Off From The Universe. Three Quarters Of The Time One's Never In Contact With Things, Only With The Beastly Words That Stand For Them.

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.

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