Carolina QuotesA totally unmystical world would be a world totally blind and insane.
Aldous Huxley Connected to the Carolinas
Source
Grey Eminence (1940)
- year
- 1940
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“A totally unmystical world would be a world totally blind an…” Aldous Huxley. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-03CC47F0F4. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/03cc47f0f4
More from Aldous Huxley
Progress and Nationalism—those were the two great ideas He put into their heads. Progress—the theory that you can get something for nothing; the theory that you can gain in one field without paying for your gain in another; the theory that you alone understand the meaning of history; the theory that you know what’s going to happen fifty years from now; the theory that, in the teeth of all experience, you can foresee all the consequences of your present actions; the theory that Utopia lies just ahead and that, since ideal ends justify the most abominable means, it is your privilege and duty to rob, swindle, torture, enslave and murder all those who, in your opinion (which is, by definition, infallible), obstruct the onward march to the earthly paradise. Remember that phrase of Karl Marx’s: ‘Force is the midwife of Progress.’ He might have added—but of course Belial didn’t want to let the cat out of the bag at that early stage of the proceedings—that Progress is the midwife of Force. Doubly the midwife, for the fact of technological progress provides people with the instruments of ever more indiscriminate destruction, while the myth of political and moral progress serves as the excuse for using those means to the very limit. I tell you, my dear sir, an undevout historian is mad. The longer you study modern history, the more evidence you find of Belial’s Guiding Hand.
Life was so short, and books so countlessly many.
I used to think I had no will to power. Now I perceive that I vented it on thoughts, rather than people. Conquering an unknown province of knowledge. Getting the better of a problem. Forcing ideas to associate or come apart. Bullying recalcitrant words to assume a certain pattern. All the fun of being a dictator without any risks and responsibilities.