There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.
The purpose of Propaganda is to make one set of people forget that other sets of people are human.
- Topic: Honesty, Leadership, Society
- Photo: Jeffrey Benjamin
More Quotes from Aldous Huxley
Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today.
Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.
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, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.
If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.
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.
More on These Topics
The first method of estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.
Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.
...the individual ceases to be himself; he adopts entirely the kind of personality offered to him by cultural patterns; and he therefore becomes exactly as all others are and as they expect him to be...The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self.
Either you will control your government, or government will control you.
Consensus: the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner: 'I stand for consensus?
Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really man it.
Do not think that what is hard for you to master is humanly impossible; but if a thing is humanly possible, consider it to be within your reach.
Howsoever you may repair it, a rift is a rift.
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.
O beautiful for spacious skies, For Amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties Above the fruited plain! America! America! God shed his grace on thee And crown thy good with brotherhood From sea to shining sea!
Consider the rights of others before your own feelings, and the feelings of others before your own rights.
My own art is a negation of society, an affirmation of the individual, outside all rules and demands of society.
Two percent of the people think; three percent of the people think they think; and ninety-five percent of the people would rather die than think.
Everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the power of the world always works in circles, and everything tries to be round. In the old days when we were a strong and happy people, all our power came to us from the sacred hoop of the nation, and so long as the hoop was unbroken the people flourished.
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what they are going to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.
A primary object should be the education of our youth in the science of government. In a republic, what species of knowledge can be equally important? And what duty more pressing than communicating it to those who are to be the future guardians of the liberties of the country.
When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - When you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, butt in favors - When you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you - When you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - You may know that your society is doomed.
New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.
Racism is not dead, but it is on life support—kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as ‘racists’.
Man lives in a world of surmise, of mystery, of uncertainties.
No matter how outrageous a lie may be, it will be accepted if stated loudly enough and often enough.