Carolina QuotesAssembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.
Aldous Huxley Connected to the Carolinas
Source
Chapter 5 (p. 42)
- work
- Brave New World Revisited (1958)
- year
- 1958
- locator
- p. 42
Cite this record
“Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning …” Aldous Huxley. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-F038B481B2. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/f038b481b2
More from Aldous Huxley
Because machines could be made progressively more and more efficient, Western man came to believe that men and societies would automatically register a corresponding moral and spiritual improvement. Attention and allegiance came to be paid, not to Eternity, but to the Utopian future. External circumstances came to be regarded as more important than states of mind about external circumstances, and the end of human life was held to be action, with contemplation as a means to that end. These false and historically, aberrant and heretical doctrines are now systematically taught in our schools and repeated, day in, day out, by those anonymous writers of advertising copy who, more than any other teachers, provide European and American adults with their current philosophy of life. And so effective has been the propaganda that even professing Christians accept the heresy unquestioningly and are quite unconscious of its complete incompatibility with their own or anybody else's religion.
When one individual comes into intimate contact with another, she — or he, of course, as the case may be — must almost inevitably receive or inflict suffering.
Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.