Aldous Huxley

The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

The more we are taught, the less we learn.

The only way to gain wisdom is to make mistakes, learn from them, and move on.

The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

The future is not a gift. It is an achievement.

I am, in point of fact, a particularly freakish specimen.

I am a kind of human tapeworm.

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.

I am a hopeless and horrible materialist.

Most human beings are dead, in fact, though they may not know it.

Medical science has made such tremendous advances that there is hardly an ailment today for which there isn't some drug that will either cure it or make the patient feel better -- until he dies.

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.

To be able to choose between two evils is not to be free.

As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. And the dictator (unless he happens to be puritanical as well as power-loving) will do well to encourage that freedom. In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope and movies, and the freedom to indulge in uninhibited sexual promiscuity, the freedom to ignore politics and the freedom to do what one likes in the field of fundamental religion will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their lot.

A man's got to be a man. A woman's got to be a woman. That's the way it's always been.

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.

One of the many reasons for the present international chaos is the fact that, in spite of universal education and the spread of literacy, the common sense of the common man has not kept pace with the multiplication of his mechanical powers.

The people who govern us don't want us to be educated. They want us to be just smart enough to go to work and pay taxes.