“‘You can only be independent of God while you’ve got youth and prosperity; independence won’t take you safely to the end.’ Well, we’ve now got youth and prosperity right up to the end. What follows? Evidently, that we can be independent of God. ‘The religious sentiment will compensate us for all our losses.’ But there aren’t any losses for us to compensate; religious sentiment is superfluous. And why should we go hunting for a substitute for youthful desires, when youthful desires never fail? A substitute for distractions, when we go on enjoying all the old fooleries to the very last? What need have we of repose when our minds and bodies continue to delight in activity? of consolation, when we have soma? of something immovable, when there is the social order?” — Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” — Luke 23:34

“Wherever God is — there is peace. And the opposite is self-evident: where there is envy, enmity, impatience, self-love — there is the devil. Wherever the devil is — there, everything is ruinous, proud and hostile.” — St. Anatoly of Optina

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“The young people who now think so poorly of [liberty] may grow up to become fighters for freedom. The cry of ‘Give me television and hamburgers, but don’t bother me with the re­sponsibilities of liberty,’ may give place, under altered circumstances, to the cry of ‘Give me liberty or give me death.’” — Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958)

“I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.” — Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)

“The fundamental problem is practical — to work out systems of psychological exercises for all types of men and women. Catholicism has many systems of mental prayer — Ignatian, Franciscan, Liguorian, Carmelite and so on. Hinduism, Northern, Southern and Zen Buddhism also have a variety of practices. There is a great work to be done here. Collecting and collating information from all these sources. Consulting books and, more important, people who have actually practised what is in the books, have had experience of teaching novices. In time, it might be possible to establish a complete and definitive Ars Contemplativa. A series of techniques, adapted to every type of mind. Techniques for meditating on, communicating with and contemplating goodness. Ends in themselves and at the same time means for realizing some of that goodness in practice.” — Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza (1936)

“To learn proper use one must first inhibit all improper uses of the self. Refuse to be hurried into gaining ends by the equivalent (in personal, psycho-physiological terms) of violent revolution; inhibit this tendency, concentrate on the means whereby the end is to be achieved; then act. This process entails knowing good and bad use — knowing them apart. By the ‘feel.’ Increased awareness and increased power of control result. Awareness and control: trivialities take on new significance. Indeed, nothing is trivial any more or negligible. Cleaning teeth, putting on shoes — such processes are reduced by habits of bad use to a kind of tiresome non-existence. Become conscious, inhibit, cease to be a greedy end-gainer, concentrate on means: tiresome non-existence turns into absorbingly interesting reality... Awareness and power of control are transferable. Skill acquired in getting to know the muscular aspect of mind-body can be carried over into the exploration of other aspects. There is increasing ability to detect one’s motives for any given piece of behaviour, to assess correctly the quality of a feeling, the real significance of a thought. Also, one becomes more clearly and consistently conscious of what’s going on in the outside world, and the judgment associated with that heightened consciousness is improved. Control also is transferred. Acquire the art of inhibiting muscular bad use and you acquire thereby the art of inhibiting more complicated trains of behaviour. Not only this: there is prevention as well as cure. Given proper correlation, many occasions for behaving undesirably just don’t arise... Hitherto preventive ethics has been thought of as external to individuals. Social and economic reforms carried out with a view to eliminating occasions for bad behaviour. This is important. But not nearly enough. Belief that it is enough makes the social-reform conception of progress nonsensical... So how satisfactory to find that there seems to be a way of making sense of the nonsense. A method of achieving progress from within as well as from without.” — Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza (1936)

“Conflict is not unavoidable. However, it is nonsensical to consider the institution of a state as a solution to the problem of possible conflict, because it is precisely the institution of a state which first makes conflict unavoidable and permanent.” — Hans-Hermann Hoppe

“Peace is the natural effect of trade.” — Montesquieu

“God may or may not exist. But there is the empirical fact that contemplation of the divinity — of goodness in its most unqualified form — is a method of realizing that goodness to some slight degree in one’s life, and results, often, in an experience as if of help towards that realization of goodness, help from some being other than one’s ordinary self and immensely superior to it.” — Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza (1936)

“If you call a man a bug, it means that you propose to treat him as a bug. Whereas if you call him a man, it means that you propose to treat him as a man. My profession [anthropology] is to study men. Which means that I must always call men by their name; always think of them as men; yes, and always treat them as men. Because if you don’t treat men as men, they don’t behave as men... If one looks for men, one finds them. Very decent ones, in a majority of cases. For example, go among a suspicious, badly treated, savage people; go unarmed, with your hands open. Go with the persistent and obstinate intention of doing them some good — curing their sick, for example. I don’t care how bitter their grievance against white men may be; in the end, if you’re given time enough to make your intentions clear, they’ll accept you as a friend, they’ll be human beings treating you as a human being. Of course, it sometimes happens that they don’t leave you the necessary time. They spear you before you’re well under way. But it doesn’t often happen — it has never happened to me, as you see — and when it does happen, well, there’s always the hope that the next man who comes will be more successful. Anthropologists may get killed; but anthropology goes on; and in the long run it can’t fail to succeed. Whereas your entomological approach... You can’t be intelligent about human beings unless you’re first sentimental about them. Sentimental in the good sense, of course. In the sense of caring for them. It’s the first indispensable condition of understanding them. If you don’t care for them, you can’t possibly understand them; all your acuteness will just be another form of stupidity... The anthropologist has got to learn to overcome that hostility and suspicion. And when he’s learnt that, he’s learnt the whole secret of politics... That if you treat other people well, they’ll treat you well... In the long run they’ll always treat you well.” — Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza (1936)

“It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellowmen.” — George MacDonald

“That faith took with me the common form it assumes with the majority of educated people of our day. It was expressed by the word ‘progress’. It then appeared to me that this word meant something. I did not as yet understand that, being tormented (like every vital man) by the question how it is best for me to live, in my answer, ‘live in conformity with progress’, I was like a man in a boat who when carried along by wind and waves should reply to what for him is the chief and only question, ‘whither to steer’, by saying, ‘we are being carried somewhere’. I did not then notice this. Only occasionally — not by reason but by instinct — I revolted against this superstition so common in our day, by which people hide from themselves their lack of understanding of life... I understood, not with my mind but with my whole being, that no theory of the reasonableness of our present progress could justify this deed; and that though everybody from the creation of the world had held it to be necessary, on whatever theory, I knew it to be unnecessary and bad; and therefore the arbiter of what is good and evil is not what people say and do, nor is it progress, but it is my heart and I.” — Leo Tolstoy, Confession (1882)

“The principal role of conservatism in modern politics is to be humiliated. That is what a perpetual loyal opposition, or court jester, is for.” — Nick Land

“It’s easier to train a smart dog than a dumb one.” — Michael Malice

“But however vigilant this censorship may be, even if the State were to take into its own hands exclusively education and all the instruction of the people, as Mazzini wished to do, and as Marx wishes to do to-day, the State can never be sure that prohibited and dangerous thoughts may not slip in and be smuggled somehow into the consciousness of the population that it governs. Forbidden fruit has such an attraction for men, and the demon of revolt, that eternal enemy of the State, awakens so easily in their hearts when they are not sufficiently stupefied, that neither this education nor this instruction, nor even the censorship, sufficiently guarantee the tranquillity of the State. It must still have a police, devoted agents who watch over and direct, secretly and unobtrusively, the current of the peoples’ opinions and passions.” — Mikhail Bakunin, Marxism, Freedom & the State (1867-1872)

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” — George Orwell, Animal Farm (1945)

“The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time.” — Ayn Rand

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