Skip to content

Civilization Quotes by Aldous Huxley

13 Civilization quotes by Aldous Huxley

All Civilization quotes Aldous Huxley’s page

Huxley’s prose has long warned of the perils hidden in progress, and here his voice turns to the broader sweep of human culture. Though brief, these thirteen reflections give a clear sense of his uneasy optimism about the direction of civilization.

Rate this collection: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ No ratings yet

Civilization is sterilization.

Image

“It is their duty to be infantile, even against their inclination.”

Image

I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then," he added in a lower tone, "I ate my own wickedness.

Image

Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.

Image

“Orgy-porgy, round and round and round, beating one another in six-eight time.”

Image

“And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.”

Image

Did you eat something that didn't agree with you?" asked Bernard. The Savage nodded "I ate civilization.

Image

The thin and precarious crust of decency is all that separates any civilization, however impressive, from the hell of anarchy or systematic…

Image

To travel is to discover that everybody is wrong. The philosophies, the civilizations which seem, at a distance, so superior to those…

Image

Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.

Image

Industrial civilization is only possible when there's no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the…

Image

Civilization means food and literature all round. Beefsteaks and fiction magazines for all. First-class proteins for the body, fourth-class love-stories for the…

Image

“Call it the fault of civilization. God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice.…

Image

Other authors on Civilization

More by Aldous Huxley

“Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself.”

Image

Man has an almost infinite capacity for taking things and people for granted and thereby missing out on the pleasure of being grateful that…

Image

My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my…

Image

Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness.

Image

Of course the Dharma-body of the Buddha was the hedge at the bottom of the garden. At the same time, and no less obviously,…

Image

“The question for the man of sense is: Do we or do we not want to go to hell? And his answer is: No,…

Image

“I’ll MAKE you be free whether you want to or not.’ -The Savage”

Image

Thought of the incomprehensible sequence of changes and chances that make up a life, all the beauties and horrors and absurdities whose conjunctions create…

Image

The third petition of the Lord's Prayer is repeated daily by millions who have not the slightest intention of letting anyone's will be done…

Image

“Then what’s time for?” asked Lenina in some astonishment. Apparently, for going on walks in the Lake District; for that was what he now…

Image

All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.

Image

Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

Image