QUOTES OF THE DAY - HUXLEY ON WAR, HISTORY & TRUTH

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