Carolina QuotesThe end cannot justify the means for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.
Aldous Huxley Connected to the Carolinas
Source
Ch. 1, p. 10 [2012 reprint]
- work
- Ends and Means (1937)
- year
- 1937
- locator
- p. 10
Cite this record
“The end cannot justify the means for the simple and obvious …” Aldous Huxley. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-9C27DF8735. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/9c27df8735
More from Aldous Huxley
Brought up in an epoch when ladies apparently rolled along on wheels, Mr. Quarles was peculiarly susceptible to calves.
For myself as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust. The supporters of these systems claimed that in some way they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning, they insisted) of the world. There was an admirably simple method of confuting these people and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotic revolt: we could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever. Similar tactics had been adopted during the eighteenth century and for the same reasons... The men of the new Enlightenment, which occurred in the middle years of the nineteenth century, once again used meaninglessness as a weapon against the reactionaries. The Victorian passion for respectability was, however, so great that, during the period when they were formulated, neither Positivism nor Darwinism was used as a justification for sexual indulgence.
Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?