Matthew McKay > Matthew's Quotes

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
― Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays, Vol. II: 1926-1929

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. 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.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“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." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

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

“Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.”
― Aldous Huxley, Texts and Pretexts: An Anthology With Commentaries

“...most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”
― Aldous Huxley

“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.”
― Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means

“Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you'd collapse. And while you people are overconsuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“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.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“A love of nature keeps no factories busy.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“The trouble with fiction," said John Rivers, "is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Genius and the Goddess

“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.”
― Aldous Huxley

“It is only when we have renounced our preoccupation with "I," "me," "mine," that we can truly possess the world in which we live. Everything, provided that we regard nothing as property. And not only is everything ours; it is also everybody else's.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy

“Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Art of Seeing

“An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited