Aldous was a grandson of T.H.Huxley, evolutionist, and related to
Matthew Arnold, novelist.
The first quote is SO relevant to the contemporary scene, but
obviously not uniquely so.
The second is not quite right unless Paris Hilton and Britney Spears
are only discernible during a trip.
- On truth:
"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."
- On psychological totalitarianism [1]
(1959): "And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be
within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making
people love their servitude, and 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,
because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda,
brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods."
- On social organizations:
"One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of
human existence is the fact that social organization is at once
necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for
their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of
their home-made monsters."
- On heroin
[2]:
"Who lives longer: the man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or
the man who lives on roast beef, water, and potatoes till ninety-five?
One passes his twenty-four months in eternity. All the years of the
beef-eater are lived only in time."
- On words: "Words form the thread on which we string our
experiences."
- On experience: "Experience is not what happens to a man; it is
what a man does with what happens to him." – Texts and Pretexts,
1932
- On chastity: "The most unnatural of the sexual perversions."
- After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the
inexpressible is music.- Music at Night, 1931
- "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad."
- "Liberty? Why it doesn't exist. There is no liberty in this
world, just gilded cages." Antic Hay, 1923
- "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."
- "Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."
- "Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and
editorial - but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense." - Brave New World
Revisited
- On religion: "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." - Point Counter Point
- "There isn't any formula or method. You learn to love by loving."