210 Aldous Huxley Quotes on War and Freedom

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1. “The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.”

2. “Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left.”

3. “Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.”

4. “After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”

5. “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

6. “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.”

7. “But, I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.” 

8. “Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability.”

9. “Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.”

10. “One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.”

11. “Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.”

12. “We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters.”

13. “Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.”

14. “People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.”

15. “The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free.”

16. “I wanted to change the world. But, I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.”

17. “It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‘try to be a little kinder.’”

18. “Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.”

19. “There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self. So, you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterward when you have worked on your own corner.”

20. “The proper study of mankind is books.”

21. “There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.” 

22. “It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.”

23. “Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at the bottom, to be more themselves.”

24. “Perhaps it’s good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?”

25. “Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.”

26. “Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced.”

27. “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel light even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. So, throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly, my darling.”

28. “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that History has to teach.”

29. “You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It’s one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.”

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

31. “We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.”

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

33. “Experience teaches only the teachable.”

34. “Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.”

35. “Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unshown marble of great sculpture. The silent bears no witness against themselves.”

36. “So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.”

37. “Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.”

38. “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.”

39. “Every man’s memory is his private literature.”

40. “A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.”

41. “A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.”

42. “Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.”

43. “Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.”

44. “I’d rather be myself.”

45. “There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.”

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

47. “Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.”

48. “Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage, the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning.”

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

50. “Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.”

51. “The goal in life is to discover that you’ve always been where you were supposed to be.”

52. “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.”

53. “An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.”

54. “The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love—almost as violent and much more mischievous.”

55. “Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.”

56. “It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness, and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.”

57. “Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.”

58. “Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people’s happiness.”

59. “People intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are.”

60. “Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.”

61. “Dream in a pragmatic way.”

62. “Several excuses are always less convincing than one.”

63. “Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.”

64. “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.”

65. “Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.”

66. “The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.”

67. “If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.”

68. “I am I, and I wish I weren’t.”

69. “There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.”

70. “The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.”

71. “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.”

72. “Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.”

73. “Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.”

74. “Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.”

75. “Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.”

76. “Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.”

77. “There’s only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.”

78. “God isn’t compatible with machinery, and scientific medicine, and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery, medicine, and happiness.”

79. “All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.”

80. “The spiritual journey does not consist of arriving at a new destination where a person gains what he did not have, or becomes what he is not. It consists of the dissipation of one’s own ignorance concerning oneself and life and the gradual growth of that understanding which begins the spiritual awakening. The finding of God is coming to one’s self.”

81. “The business of a seer is to see; and if he involves himself in the kind of God-eclipsing activities which make seeing impossible, he the trust which his fellows have tacitly placed in him.”

82. “To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.”

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

84. “Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.”

85. “The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”

86. “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.”

87. “Hell isn’t merely paved with good intentions; it’s walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.”

88. “The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar. Hence, it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.”

89. “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.”

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

91. “I like being myself. Myself and nasty.”

92. “Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three-quarters of the time one’s never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.”

93. “To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.”

94. “Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.”

95. “That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.”

96. “Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty—his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.”

97. “A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.”

98. “One of the great attractions of patriotism—it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation, we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what’s more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.”

99. “A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will’s freedom after it.”

100. “The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.”

101. “The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”

102. “Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects—totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.”

103. “Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.”

104. “There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will, in fact, have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it.”

105. “Dictators can always consolidate their tyranny by an appeal to patriotism.”

106. “In regard to propaganda, the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities—the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda 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 distractions.”

107. “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.”

108. “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.”

109. “Human beings act in a great variety of irrational ways, but all of them seem to be capable if given a fair chance, of making a reasonable choice in the light of available evidence. Democratic institutions can be made to work only if all concerned do their best to impart knowledge and to encourage rationality. But today, in the world’s most powerful democracy, the politicians and the propagandists prefer to make nonsense of democratic procedures by appealing almost exclusively to the ignorance and irrationality of the electors.”

110. “A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced because they love their servitude.”

111. “The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.”

112. “What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But, the sons of heroes—ah, they have all the necessary leisure.”

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

114. “I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.”

115. “The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.”

116. “Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.”

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

118. “Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.”

119. “Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.”

120. “Chastity—the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.”

121. “Cynical realism is the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.”

122. “We are all geniuses up to the age of 10.”

123. “Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.”

124. “Familiarity breeds indifference.”

125. “A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.”

126. “Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.”

127. “Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.”

128. “If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.”

129. “Love casts out fear, but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth.”

130. “Every ceiling reached becomes a floor.”

131. “The more you know, the more you see.”

132. “Which is better—to be born stupid into an intelligent society or intelligent into an insane one?”

133. “The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with a good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’—this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”

134. “What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.”

135. “Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.”

136. “Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.”

137. “Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn’t become king. He gets lynched.”

138. “Don’t try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We’re all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat—and the boat is perpetually sinking.”

139. “Higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue.”

140. “The question of the next generation will not be one of how to liberate the masses, but rather, how to make them love their servitude.”

141. “Facts are ventriloquist’s dummies. Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.”

142. “The third petition of the Lord’s Prayer is repeated daily by millions who have not the slightest intention of letting anyone’s will be done but their own.”

143. “It’s a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research and study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.”

144. “We shall be permitted to live on this planet only for as long as we treat all nature with compassion and intelligence.”

145. “To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived thought, and felt with style.”

146. “‘The trouble with fiction,’ said John Rivers, ‘is that it makes too much sense.’ Reality never makes sense.”

147. “We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy, we only look.”

148. “If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons, that would not progress. For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure; as a monster he was superb.”

149. “The world is an illusion, but an illusion which we must take seriously.”

150. “But, the nature of the universe is such that ends can never justify means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end.”

151. “In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ourselves. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth.”

152. “An intellectual is a person who’s found one thing that’s more interesting than sex.”

153. “I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.”

154. “No social stability without individual stability.”

155. “Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.”

156. “It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.”

157. “Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.”

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

159. “Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment.”

160. “Isn’t there something in living dangerously?”

161. “If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can, and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.”

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

163. “You got rid of them. Yes, that’s just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether ‘tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows, or outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. But you don’t do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It’s too easy.”

164. “Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe.”

165. “Nothing costs enough here.”

166. “Everyone works for everyone else. We can’t do without anyone. Even Epsilons are useful. We couldn’t do without Epsilons.”

167. “There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality.”

168. “Pain was a fascinating horror.”

169. “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.”

170. “Ending is better than mending.”

171. “To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by mind at large—this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.”

172. “Visual impressions are greatly intensified and the eye recovers some of the perceptual innocence of childhood when the sensum was not immediately and automatically subordinated to the concept. Interest in space is diminished and interest in time falls almost to zero.”

173. “And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.”

174. “It isn’t only art that is incompatible with happiness, it’s also science. Science is dangerous, we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.”

175. “There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.”

176. “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”

177. “Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning, truth and beauty can’t.”

178. “But, everyone belongs to everyone else.”

179. “Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and more terrible becomes the price that must be paid.”

180. “The older dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles, and mysteries.”

181. “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.”

182. “Addiction is an increasing desire for an act that gives less and less satisfaction.”

183. “To be a fool at the right time is also an art.”

184. “All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.”

185. “Ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.”

186. “A love of nature keeps no factories busy.”

187. “Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.”

188. “The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.”

189. “We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”

190. “However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for.”

191. “But, the man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.”

192. “Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born—the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people’s experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. That which, in the language of religion, is called ‘this world’ is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language.”

193. “The urge to escape from selfhood and the environment is in almost everyone almost all the time.”

194. “We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances, we are by ourselves.”

195. “At breakfast that morning, I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colours. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation—the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.”

196. “By its very nature, every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable.”

197. “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is—infinite.”

198. “Technology has tended to devaluate the traditional vision-inducing materials. The illumination of a city, for example, was once a rare event, reserved for victories and national holidays, for the canonization of saints and the crowning of kings. Now it occurs nightly and celebrates the virtues of gin, cigarettes, and toothpaste.”

199. “For Monet, on this occasion, water lilies were the measure of water lilies; and so he painted them.”

200. “What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescaline, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time.”

201. “The Bhagavad-Gita is the most systematic statement of spiritual evolution of endowing value to mankind. It is one of the most clear and comprehensive summaries of perennial philosophy ever revealed; hence its enduring value is subject not only to India but to all of humanity.”

202. “All that is needed is money and a candidate who can be coached to look sincere. Political principles and plans for specific action have come to lose most of their importance. The personality of the candidate, the way he is projected by the advertising experts, are the things that really matter.”

203. “Liberties are not given, they are taken.”

204. “People often ask me what is the most effective technique for transforming their life. It is a little embarrassing that after years and years of research and experimentation, I have to say that the best answer is—just be a little kinder.”

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

206. “This Power Elite directly employs several millions of the country’s working force in its factories, offices, and stores, controls many millions more by lending them the money to buy its products, and, through its ownership of the media of mass communication, influences the thoughts, the feelings and the actions of virtually everybody.” 

207. “Science in itself is morally neutral; it becomes good or evil according as it is applied.”

208. “The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.”

209. “Hitler’s vast propaganda successes were accomplished with little more than the radio and loudspeaker, and without TV and tape and video recording. Today the art of mind control is in the process of becoming a science.”