Pleasure cannot be shared; like Pain, it can only be experienced or inflicted, and when we give Pleasure to our Lovers or bestow Charity upon the Needy, we do so, not to gratify the object of our Benevolence, but only ourselves. For the Truth is that we are kind for the same reason as we are cruel, in order that we may enhance the sense of our own Power.
Aldous HuxleyAll democracies are based on the proposition that power is very dangerous and that it is extremely important not to let any one person or small group have too much power for too long a time
Aldous HuxleyWriters write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.
Aldous HuxleyLife's so ordinary that literature has to deal with the exceptional. Exceptional talent, power, social position, wealth.... Dramabegins where there's freedom of choice. And freedom of choice begins when social or psychological conditions are exceptional. That's why the inhabitants of imaginative literature have always been recruited from the pages of Who's Who.
Aldous HuxleyThe question of the next generation will not be one of how to liberate the masses, but rather, how to make them love their servitude.
Aldous HuxleyThe legs, for example, of that chair--how miraculous their tubularity, how supernatural their polished smoothness! I spent several minutes--or was it several centuries?--not merely gazing at those bamboo legs, but actually being them---or rather being myself in them; or, to be still more accurate (for "I" was not involved in the case, nor in a certain sense were "they") being my Not-self in the Not-self which was the chair.
Aldous Huxley