Aldous Huxley

If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.

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.

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.

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.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.

I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.

The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.

Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.

All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.

These are the sort of things people ought to look at. Things without pretensions, satisfied to be merely themselves.

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.

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.