Aldous Huxley Quotes

People are always trying to draw simplistic dialectics that can capture things.

… steer clear of bogus simplicity

I hate bumper stickers, you can't sum anything up. All you do is paint yourself in some caricaturist corner.

When a thing is said to be not worth refuting you may be sure that either it is flagrantly stupid - in which case all comment is superfluous - or it is something formidable, the very crux of the problem.

Philosophers, as things now stand, are all too fond of offering criticism from on high instead of studying and understanding things from within.

What I really don't like is oversimplification.

Of the many forms of false culture, a premature converse with abstractions is perhaps the most likely to prove fatal to the growth of a masculine vigour of intellect.

The television industry doesn't like to see the compexity of the world. It prefers simple reporting, with simple ideas: this is white, that's black; this is good, that's bad.

Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!

The more one-dimensional an explanation of something complex and far reaching, the greater the grounds for skepticism.

Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think.

I often advocate that we look at many sides of an issue, walk in someone else's shoes, and identify and reject false choices.

You can get so well educated in America that your thoughts become detached from common sense. You can get so complicated in your thinking that the obvious isn't real to you anymore.

Theology is just what you really think about God, and if you're going to do that, you'd better use your mind and not just let it be a receptacle - a catch-all for whatever beliefs happen to be passing by.

Only superficial minds approach an idea with delicacy.

Conspiracy theories are an irresistible labor-saving device in the face of complexity.

Unfortunately, simplistic framing of problems leads to simplistic answers.

Nobody really thinks who does not abstract from that which is given, who does not relate the facts to the factors which have made them, who does not - in his mind - undo the facts. Abstractness is the very life of thought, the token of its authenticity.

He who in reasoning cites authority is making use of his memory rather than of his intellect.

What is simple is wrong, and what is complicated cannot be understood.

Philosophy is by its nature something esoteric, neither made for the mob nor capable of being prepared for the mob.

Skepticism rather than credulity is the highest principle that the human intellect can use to ennoble our existence.

An educated mind is practiced in the uses of reason, which inevitably leads to a skeptical outlook.

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect...

What's the point in having a mind if you don't use it to make judgements?