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.
Aldous Huxley
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.
Aldous Huxley
The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
Aldous Huxley
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Aldous Huxley
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.
Aldous Huxley
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
Aldous Huxley
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
Aldous Huxley
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.
Aldous Huxley
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.
Aldous Huxley
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
Aldous Huxley
The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.
Aldous Huxley
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
Aldous Huxley
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.
Aldous Huxley
The problem with a mind like Huxley is the people who need to read him, and understand, don’t.
“But the fact is that every intelligent man wants to rule society like a gangster–by force alone.”
Albert Camus, “The Fall”