Aldous Huxley Quotes

History is another country and might be full of fascinating incidents and places to go visit - but as a destination for emigration, it has some problems!

When I was in Thailand, I went into the up-country because Marco Polo didn't get down into the flesh pots of Bangkok because they didn't exist in those days.

I'm trying to get to a deep future, but in order to get to a deep future, I had to think about the deep past.

Ideas are interesting to me, and religions are a place where ideas have been very subtly embodied for thousands of years. All literature started as sacred literature.

In Turkey it was always 1952, in Malaysia 1937; Afghanistan was 1910 and Bolivia 1949. It is 20 years ago in the Soviet Union, 10 in Norway, five in France. It is always last year in Australia and next week in Japan.

America has never forgotten - and never will forget - the nobler things that brought her into being and that light her path - the path that was entered upon only one hundred and fifty years ago ... How young she is! It will be centuries before she will adopt that maturity of custom - the clothing of the grave - that some people believe she is already fitted for.

China has had a long and complex history and has managed to evolve its own culture for 4,000 years. It therefore not necessarily true that we know exactly what is best for the internal structure of China.

We're at a historical juncture: A growing number of people are declaring what has been achieved over the past decades in Europe to be wrong. They want to return to the nation-state. Sometimes there is even a blood and soil rhetoric that for me is starkly reminiscent of the interwar years of the past century, whose demons we are still all too familiar with.

He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.

I lived in Judea eighteen hundred years ago, but I never knew that there was such a one as Christ among my contemporaries.

Just because something is traditional is no reason to do it, of course. Piracy, for example, is a tradition that has been carried on for hundreds of years, but that doesn't mean we should all attack ships and steal their gold.

You can go back 500 years. You cannot find a more audacious plan.

To look back to antiquity is one thing, to go back to it is another.

For people, 'here' signifies not merely a physical space, but also an historical space.

History isn't about dates and places and wars. It's about the people who fill the spaces between them.

The death of the music business was insane, but audio recordings have been around now for maybe 120 years. Books have been around for, what, nine centuries? So they're more entrenched than music.

[Albert] Hoxie, my Western Civilization professor. I had him in my freshman year and he opened up an extraordinary world to me that I've never forgotten. He used his extensive knowledge of art history to illustrate the development of Western culture and politics.

The Jew has his anchorage not in place but in time, in his highly developed sense of history as personal context. Six thousand years of self-awareness are a homeland.

The color, the shape, and the texture--none of it is accidental. Every item we wear has a glorious (or sometimes not so glorious) history, and that history extends back years--centuries, even--before Oscar de la Renta's 2002 collection.

I just went to Europe, spent a year traveling, and then I came home with a finished album and said, "Hey everyone I'm back!" I gave everyone their lighters from Luxembourg, gave them the postcards from Italy and Rome, then said, "Hey look, I made a record, too" and played it for them. The general reaction was shock, because it was so different from what they've known me to do.

It's a foreground of my feeling. That place moves me. And I don't mean my country; it's part of our shared natural world that happens to be particular to a sense of wherever my storytelling inclinations come from and my own history of kind of being a road rat and travelling.

Every problem in history is due to men, so I'm basically asking for humanity to nest itself in a feminine culture, probably for the next 1,000 years.

When I go into my living room and turn on the TV, I feel like I have gone backwards in time by 20 to 30 years. It's an area of intense interest. I can't say more than that.

Look, history is interesting. I read three books on George Washington last year. And my opinion is that if they're still analyzing the first president, the 43rd president ought to be doing what he thinks is right. And eventually, historians will come and realize whether... the decisions I made made sense.

I plan years in advance, but I like to leave enough space in the narrative scheme to change things, because I always get my best ideas the closer I come to the end of a project, after I've lived with it for a while.