Aldous Huxley

He liked to think of himself as a merciless vivisector probing into the palpitating entrails of his own soul.

A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind. Another question: why do some people remain open and elastic into extreme old age, whereas others become rigid and unproductive before they're fifty?

That is the secret of happiness and virtue - liking what you've got to do.

Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?

The function of the well-intentioned individual, acting in isolation, is to formulate or disseminate theoretical truths. The function of the well-intentioned individuals in association is to live in accordance with those truths, to demonstrate what happens when theory is translated into practice, to create small-scale working models of the better form of society to which the speculative idealist looks forward.

Imagine a factory staffed by Alphas__hat is to say by separate and unrelated individuals of good heredity and conditioned so as to be capable (within limits) of making a free choice and assuming responsibilities. Imagine it!

Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously overcompensates a secret doubt.

Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment and because books were scarce and difficult to reproduce...As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.

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

De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.

The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray.

One entered the world, Denis pursued, having ready-made ideas about everything. One had a philosophy and tried to make life fit into it. One should have lived first and then made one's philosophy to fit life...Life, facts, things were horribly complicated; ideas, even the most difficult of them, deceptively simple. In the world of ideas, everything was clear; in life all was obscure, embroiled. Was it surprising that one was miserable, horribly unhappy?

There's so much one doesn't know; it wasn't my business to know. I mean, when a child asks you how a helicopter works or who made the world__ell, what are you to answer if you're a Beta and have always worked in the Fertilizing Room? What are you to answer?

One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, toward decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.

A hell, from which one can be saved by a quibble that would carry no weight with a police magistrate, cannot be taken very seriously.

Happiness is a hard master - particularly other people's happiness.

If you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible.

Democracy is, among other things, the ability to say 'no' to the boss. But a man cannot say 'no' to the boss, unless he is sure of being able to eat when the boss's favour has been withdrawn.