Tag: Aldous Huxley

To the gross senses the chair seems solid and substantial. But the gross senses can be refined by means of instruments. Closer observations are made, as the result of which we are forced to conclude that the chair is “really” a swarm of electric charges whizzing about in empty space. … While the substantial chair is an abstraction easily made from the memories of innumerable sensations of sight and touch, the electric charge chair is a difficult and far-fetched abstraction from certain visual sensations so excessively rare (they can only come to us in the course of elaborate experiments) that not one man in a million has ever been in the position to make it for himself. The overwhelming majority of us accept the electric-charge chair on authority, as good Catholics accept transubstantiation.

Aldous Huxley

The trouble with fiction… is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.

Aldous Huxley

An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.

Aldous Huxley

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood.

Aldous Huxley

In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies—the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distraction.

Aldous Huxley

The end cannot justify the means for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.

Aldous Huxley

Societies are composed of individuals and are good only insofar as they help individuals to realize their potentialities and to lead a happy and creative life.

Aldous Huxley

After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Aldous Huxley

That all men are equal is a proposition which at ordinary times no sane individual has ever given his assent.

Aldous Huxley

Democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralization of power.

Aldous Huxley