Carolina QuotesAs for 'taking sides' — the choice, it seems to me, is no longer between two users of violence, two systems of dictatorship. Violence and dictatorship cannot produce peace and liberty; they can only produce the results of violence and dictatorship, results with which history has made us only too sickeningly familiar. The choice now is between militarism and pacifism. To me, the necessity of pacifism seems absolutely clear.
Aldous Huxley Connected to the Carolinas
Source
Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War (1937) edited by Nancy Cunard and published by the Left Review
- year
- 1937
Cite this record
“As for 'taking sides' — the choice, it seems to me, is no lo…” Aldous Huxley. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-28F238B6AC. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/28f238b6ac
More from Aldous Huxley
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.
The quality of moral behaviour varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.
Democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralization of power.