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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.

-Aldous Huxley

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Within The Next Generation

Aldous Huxley

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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.

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It Is Possible To Argue That The Really Influential Book Is Not That Which Converts Ten Millions Of Casual Readers, But Rather That Which Converts The Very Few Who, At Any Given Moment, Succeed In Seizing Power. Marx And Sorel Have Been Influential In The Modern World, Not So Much Because They Were Best-sellers (sorel In Particular Was Not At All A Widely Read Author), But Because Among Their Few Readers Were Two Men, Called Respectively Lenin And Mussolini.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Life's So Ordinary That Literature Has To Deal With The Exceptional. Exceptional Talent, Power, Social Position, Wealth.... Dramabegins Where There's Freedom Of Choice. And Freedom Of Choice Begins When Social Or Psychological Conditions Are Exceptional. That's Why The Inhabitants Of Imaginative Literature Have Always Been Recruited From The Pages Of Who's Who.

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

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

Meaninglessness

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

This Power Elite Directly Employs Several Millions Of The Country´s Working Force In Its Factories, Offices And Stores, Controls Many Millions More By Lending Them The Money To Buy Its Products, And, Through Its Ownership Of The Media Of Mass Communication, Influences The Thoughts, The Feelings And The Actions Of Virtually Everybody. To Parody The Words Of W. Churchill, Never Have So Many Been Manipulated So Much By Few.

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

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.

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.

Human Contacts Have Been So Highly Valued In The Past Only Because Reading Was Not A Common Accomplishment.... The World, You Must Remember, Is Only Just Becoming Literate. As Reading Becomes More And More Habitual And Widespread, An Ever-increasing Number Of People Will Discover That Books Will Give Them All The Pleasures Of Social Life And None Of Its Intolerable Tedium.

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

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.

Home, Home -- A Few Small Rooms, Stiflingly Over-inhabited By A Man, By A Periodically Teeming Woman, By A Rabble Of Boys And Girls Of All Ages. No Air, No Space; An Understerilized Prison; Darkness, Disease, And Smells.

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.

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

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.

To Be Well Informed, One Must Read Quickly A Great Number Of Merely Instructive Books. To Be Cultivated, One Must Read Slowly And With A Lingering Appreciation The Comparatively Few Books That Have Been Written By Men Who Lived, Thought, And Felt With Style.

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

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

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

The Advertisement Is One Of The Most Interesting And Difficult Of Modern Literary Forms.

I'm Sick. I've Eaten Civilisation And I'm Sick.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

Nonsense Is An Assertion Of Man's Spiritual Freedom In Spite Of All The Oppressions Of Circumstance.

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

You Never See Animals Going Through The Absurd And Often Horrible Fooleries Of Magic And Religion. . . . Dogs Do Not Ritually Urinate In The Hope Of Persuading Heaven To Do The Same And Send Down Rain. Asses Do Not Bray A Liturgy To Cloudless Skies. Nor Do Cats Attempt, By Abstinence From Cat's Meat, To Wheedle The Feline Spirits Into Benevolence. Only Man Behaves With Such Gratuitous Folly. It Is The Price He Has To Pay For Being Intelligent But Not, As Yet, Quite Intelligent Enough.

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.

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.

Assembled In A Crowd, People Lose Their Powers Of Reasoning And Their Capacity For Moral Choice.

If You Want To Write, Keep Cats.

...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.

For Particulars, As Everyone Knows, Make For Virtue And Happiness; Generalities Are Intellectually Necessary Evils. Not Philosophers But Fretsawyers And Stamp Collectors Compose The Backbone Of Society.

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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!]

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

A Million Million Spermatozoa, All Of Them Alive: Out Of Their Cataclysm But One Poor Noah Dare Hope To Survive.

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

A Love Of Nature Keeps No Factories Busy.

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

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

The Silent Bear No Witness Against Themselves.

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

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

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.

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So The Journey Is Over And I Am Back Again Where I Started, Richer By Much Experience And Poorer By Many Unexploded Certainties. For Convictions And Certainties Are Too Often The Concomitants Of Ignorance. Those Who Like To Feel They Are Always Right And Who Attached A High Importance To Their Own Opinions Should Stay At Home. When One Is Traveling, Convictions Are Mislaid As Easily As Spectacles; But Unlike Spectacles, They Are Not Easily Replaced.

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.

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

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.

Good Is A Product Of The Ethical And Spiritual Artistry Of Individuals; It Cannot Be Mass-produced.

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.

But Every One Belongs To Every One Else

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doing Your Best

Happiness Is Never Grand.

Words Are Magical In The Way They Affect The Minds Of Those Who Use Them.

In Life, Man Proposes, God Disposes.

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.

Cleanliness Is Next To Fordliness.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Parodies And Caricatures Are The Most Penetrating Of Criticisms.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

...it Is Not What One Has Experienced But What One Does With What One Has Experienced That Matters.

Ultimate Reality Is Not Clearly And Immediately Apprehended Except By Those Who Have Made Themselves Loving, Pure In Heart And Poor In Spirit.

Death Is The Only Thing We Haven't Succeeded In Completely Vulgarizing.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Words Form The Thread On Which We String Our Experiences.

Dinted Dimpled Wimpled-his Mind Wandered Down Echoing Corridors Of Assonance And Alliteration Ever Further And Further From The Point. He Was Enamoured With The Beauty Of Words.

One Of The Great Attractions Of Patriotism - It Fulfills Our Worst Wishes. In The Person Of Our Nation We Are Able, Vicariously, To Bully And Cheat. Bully And Cheat, What's More, With A Feeling That We Are Profoundly Virtuous.

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.

I'm Claiming The Right To Be Unhappy.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Love Casts Out Fear; But Conversely Fear Casts Out Love. And Not Only Love. Fear Also Casts Out Intelligence, Casts Out Goodness, Casts Out All Thought Of Beauty And Truth.

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.

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

Every Individual Is At Once The Beneficiary And The Victim Of The Linguistic Tradition Into Which He Has Been Born - The Beneficiary Inasmuch As Language Gives Access To The Accumulated Records Of Other People's Experience, The Victim In So Far As It Confirms Him In The Belief That Reduced Awareness Is The Only Awareness And As It Bedevils His Sense Of Reality, So That He Is All Too Apt To Take His Concepts For Data, His Words For Actual Things.

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.

I Have Discovered The Most Exciting, The Most Arduous Literary Form Of All, The Most Difficult To Master, The Most Pregnant In Curious Possibilities. I Mean The Advertisement. It Is Far Easier To Write Ten Passably Effective Sonnets, Good Enough To Take In The Not Too Inquiring Critic, Than One Effective Advertisement That Will Take In A Few Thousand Of The Uncritical Buying Public.

Habit Converts Luxurious Enjoyments Into Dull And Daily Necessities.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

The Christian Idea Of A Perfect Heaven That Is Something Other Than A Non-existence Is A Contradiction In Terms.

I Ate Civilization. It Poisoned Me; I Was Defiled. And Then," He Added In A Lower Tone, "i Ate My Own Wickedness.

Given A Fair Chance, Human Beings Can Govern Themselves, And Govern Themselves Better

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.'

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

Never Give Children A Chance Of Imagining That Anything Exists In Isolation. Make It Plain From The Very Beginning That All Living Is Relationship. Show Them Relationships In The Woods, In The Fields, In The Ponds And Streams, In The Village And In The Country Around It. Rub It In.

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

Higher Education Is Not Necessarily A Guarantee Of Higher Virtue.

Nothing Is More Dreadful Than A Cold, Unimpassioned Indulgence. And Love Infallibly Becomes Cold And Unimpassioned When It Is Too Lightly Made.

The Scent Organ Was Playing A Delightfully Refreshing Herbal Capriccio - Rippling Arpeggios Of Thyme And Lavender, Of Rosemary, Basil, Myrtle, Tarragon; A Series Of Daring Modulations Through The Spice Keys Into Ambergris; And A Slow Return Through Sandalwood, Camphor, Cedar And Newmown Hay (with Occasional Subtle Touches Of Discord - A Whiff Of Kidney Pudding, The Faintest Suspicion Of Pig's Dung) Back To The Simple Aromatics With Which The Piece Began. The Final Blast Of Thyme Died Away; There Was A Round Of Applause; The Lights Went Up.

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

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

Can You Say Something About Nothing?

Every Man's Memory Is His Private Literature.

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

Brave New World

Faith, It Is Evident, May Be Relied On To Produce Sustained Action And, More Rarely, Sustained Contemplation.

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

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

Brave New World

Eating, Drinking, Dying - Three Primary Manifestations Of The Universal And Impersonal Life. Animals Live That Impersonal And Universal Life Without Knowing Its Nature. Ordinary People Know Its Nature But Don't Live It And, If They Think Seriously About It, Refuse To Accept It. An Enlightened Person Knows It, Lives It, And Accepts It Completely. He Eats, He Drinks, And In Due Course He Dies - But He Eats With A Difference, Drinks With A Difference, Dies With A Difference.

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

Brave New World

Man Approaches The Unattainable Truth Through A Succession Of Errors.

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

Man Is Hypnotized By The Glitter Of His Own Gadgetry

‎"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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

Wild Inside; Raging, Writhing—yes, "writhing" Was The Word, Writhing With Desire. But Outwardly He Was Hopelessly Tame; Outwardly—baa, Baa, Baa.

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

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

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

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

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.

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 .

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.

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.

Cant Is Always Rather Nauseating; But Before We Condemn Political Hypocrisy, Let Us Remember That It Is The Tribute Paid By Men Of Leather To Men Of God, And That The Acting Of The Part Of Someone Better Than Oneself May Actually Commit One To A Course Of Behavior Perceptibly Less Evil Than What Would Be Normal And Natural In An Avowed Cynic.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

The Business Of A Seer Is To See; And If He Involves Himself In The Kind Of God-eclipsing Activities Which Make Seeing Impossible, He Betrays The Trust Which His Fellows Have Tacitly Placed In Him.

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.

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

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.

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

If You Want To Be A Psychological Novelist And Write About Human Beings, The Best Thing You Can Do Is Keep A Pair Of Cats.

In Any Race Between Human Numbers And Natural Resources, Time Is Against Us.

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