"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
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Quote collection
Aldous Huxley quotes (page 8 of 34)
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"But every one belongs to every one else"
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"The people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they're the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals."
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"Industrialization is the systemic exploitation of wasting assets. In all too many cases, the thing we call progress is merely an acceleration in the rate of that exploitation."
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"What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood."
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"We can't allow science to undo its own good work."
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"We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is to learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way."
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"The goal in life is to discover that you’ve always been where you were supposed to be."
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"A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind."
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"Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement."
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"For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody."
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"To talk about religion except in terms of human psychology is an irrelevance."
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"The leech's kiss, the squid's embrace, The prurient ape's defiling touch: And do you like the human race? No, not much."
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"As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends correspondingly to increase. And the dictator will do well to encourage that freedom...it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate."
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"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."
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"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."
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"I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption ... For myself, as no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneous liberation from a certain political and economic system, and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom."
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"There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God."
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"One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, toward decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary."
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"One of the great triumphs of the nineteenth century was to limit the connotation of the word "immoral" in such a way that, for practical purposes, only those were immoral who drank too much or made too copious love. Those who indulged in any or all of the other deadly sins could look down in righteous indignation on the lascivious and the gluttonous.... In the name of all lechers and boozers I most solemnly protest against the invidious distinction made to our prejudice."
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