Carolina QuotesI 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.
Aldous Huxley Connected to the Carolinas
Source
Ch. 13
- work
- Eyeless in Gaza (1936)
- year
- 1936
Cite this record
“I used to think I had no will to power. Now I perceive that …” Aldous Huxley. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-1E6D563870. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/1e6d563870
More from Aldous Huxley
A totally unmystical world would be a world totally blind and insane.
The modern world is still suffering from the native incapacity of the Jews to be political. The art of making and preserving a City, which we call be the Greek name, “Politics,” was never an indigenous growth among the Hebrews. The City of the Greeks and the other civilized nations of antiquity was hateful to them. Their ideas were essentially anti-political. The politics of Judaea, when there were any, were borrowed from the Egyptians and Babylonians and, later, from the Greeks. These borrowings were regarded with violent disapproval by the champions of Hebrew orthodoxy, who objected to organized civilization on two grounds. Some, like Amos, hated it just because it was civilization and not nomadic barbarism. It was in the desert that God had made his covenant with the Chosen Race, and in the desert there was nothing else to think about but God. So, Back to the Desert! was their war-cry. Others, the Ebionites, objected to civilization because it was hierarchical, because it made for social inequality. They gave prophetically indignant utterance to the envious hatred of the poor in cash and in spirit against the rich and talented and cultured. A pious and universal mediocrity was their ideal.
"There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self. Your own self," he repeated. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you've worked on your own corner.