quotes : Aldous Huxley

• On truth: "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."
• On psychological totalitarianism ^[13] (1959): "And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and 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, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods."
• On social organizations: "One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters."
• On heroin: "Who lives longer: the man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or the man who lives on roast beef, water, and potatoes till ninety-five? One passes his twenty-four months in eternity. All the years of the beef-eater are lived only in time."
• On experience: "Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him." – Texts and Pretexts, 1932
• "After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music." Music at Night, 1931
• "Liberty? Why it doesn't exist. There is no liberty in this world, just gilded cages." Antic Hay, 1923
• "Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial - but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense." - Brave New World Revisited
• On religion: "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."
• "God deliver us from such criminal imbecility." Ends and Means