To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
All our science is just a cookery book, with an orthodox theory of cooking that nobody's allowed to question, and a list of recipes that mustn't be added to except by special permission from the head cook.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Huxley criticizes the limitations placed on scientific inquiry, suggesting that it resembles a rigid cookbook with unchangeable rules.
In this quote, Aldous Huxley draws a parallel between science and a cookery book, criticizing the rigid and dogmatic nature often associated with scientific theories. He suggests that just as a cookery book prescribes fixed recipes and discourages deviation, the scientific community may impose strict guidelines that inhibit creativity and innovation, ultimately questioning the very essence and evolution of scientific knowledge.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture on the philosophy of science, this quote can be used to illustrate the importance of questioning established theories.
More from Aldous Huxley
All quotes →Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
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.
On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.
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 leech's kiss, the squid's embrace, The prurient ape's defiling touch: And do you like the human race? No, not much.
Similar quotes
The brain is the most complicated organ in the universe. We have learned a lot about other human organs. We know how the heart pumps and how the kidney does what it does. To a certain degree, we have read the letters of the human genome. But the brain has 100 billion neurons. Each one of those has about 10,000 connections.
Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.
The recent developments in cosmology strongly suggest that the universe may be the ultimate free lunch.
Even though I knew pretty early that I was going to be a scientist, it wasn't the science that interested me in science fiction; it was the vision of future societies that, for better or worse, would be radically different from our own.
What, then, is this blue sky, which certainly does exist, and which veils from us the stars during the day?
Even Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, and Albert Einstein made serious mistakes. But the scientific enterprise arranges things so that teamwork prevails: What one of us, even the most brilliant among us, misses, another of us, even someone much less celebrated and capable, may detect and rectify.