Aldous Huxley Quotes

Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly-they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.

Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can’t.

One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.

In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic.

I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then, I ate my own wickedness.

A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.

You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.

Yes, and civilization is sterilization.

When people are suspicious with you, you start being suspicious with them.

Wheels must turn steadily, but cannot turn untended. There must be men to tend them, men as steady as the wheels upon their axles, sane men, obedient men, stable in contentment.

What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you?

What would it be like if I could, if I were free-not enslaved by my conditioning.