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.
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
- Topic: Perception, Travel
- Location: Yellowstone National Park
- Photo: Jeffrey Benjamin
More Quotes from Aldous Huxley
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.
The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.
The purpose of Propaganda is to make one set of people forget that other sets of people are human.
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.
If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.
More Quotes from Yellowstone National Park
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I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.
Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.
You must try to observe yourself more and more objectively, to look at everything in yourself as though another person.
If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.
Most people are on the world, not in it—have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them—undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.
The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.
Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for. Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us.
As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.
