Aldous Huxley Quotes

It is man's intelligence that makes him so often behave more stupidly than the beasts. Man is impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic. Thus, no animal is clever enough, when there is a drought, to imagine that the rain is being withheld by evil spirits, or as punishment for its transgressions. Therefore you never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. No horse, for example would kill one of its foals to make the wind change direction. Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, intelligent enough.

Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.

Man is the inventor of stupidity.

The object of pure physics is the unfolding of the laws of the intelligible world; the object of pure mathematics that of unfolding the laws of human intelligence.

We don't see very far in the future, we are very focused on one idea at a time, one problem at a time, and all these are incompatible with rationality as economic theory assumes it.

Foolishness is rarely a matter of lack of intelligence or even lack of information.

The stupidity of a stupid man is exercised in a restricted field; the stupidity of an intelligent man has a much wider diffusion, and a far greater effect, aided as it is by the element of surprise.

The folly of men not their hard heartedness was the great cause of the world s poverty.

The basest person is capable of perceiving the weaknesses of the greatest, the most stupid, the errors in the thought of the most intelligent.

Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.

It begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible.

After readinf some essay on the nature of human fallibility, I was very aware that we are the recipients of a huge amount of discovery over the last century. Medicine exemplifies this. And that has transitioned us from a world in which people's lives were mostly governed by ignorance to one that's constrained by ineptitude. A century ago, we didn't know, for instance, what diseases afflicted us, what their nature really was, or what to do about them. And that has changed.

One of the reasons people might be fallible, why we might fail to do what we try to do isignorance, that we have a limited understanding of the laws of the world - the physical laws that govern the world and of all the particulars of the world upon which those laws work. And then there's ineptitude, meaning that the knowledge is available, but individuals fail to apply it correctly. The third source is "necessary fallibility." That is, we're never going to be omniscient, there is some knowledge that we will simply never achieve, and there are limits to what we will be able to do.

Highly intelligent and well-informed people disagree on every political issue. Therefore, intelligence and knowledge are useless for making decisions, because if any of that stuff helped, then all the smart people would have the same opinions. So use your "gut instinct" to make voting choices. That is exactly like being clueless, but with the added advantage that you'll feel as if your random vote preserved democracy.

In this world, man has two significant possessions: intelligence and emotion. These two possessions govern our day-to-day life. But very often we see that emotion (ego) gets the upper hand in our life. We know that even if someone is extremely intelligent, when his emotion comes to the fore it will devour him. He is compelled to do what his emotion asks him to do.

Never forget that intelligence rules the world and ignorance carries the burden. Therefore, remove yourself as far as possible from ignorance and seek as far as possible to be intelligent.

Theoretically, I grant you, there is no possibility of error in necessary reasoning. But to speak thus "theoretically," is to uselanguage in a Pickwickian sense. In practice, and in fact, mathematics is not exempt from that liability to error that affects everything that man does.

I have nothing intelligent to say.

If Newborn Babies Could Speak They Would Be The Most Intelligent Beings On Planet Earth.

This is one of the great social functions of science - to free people from superstition

I certainly have had experiences of a sense of wonder at the world and a feeling that even though it could all be explained rationally, it still feels that there is more to it.

In the world we live in, what we know and what we don't know are like Siamese twins, inseparable, existing in a state of confusion.

Let us overthrow the totems, break the taboos. Or better, let us consider them cancelled. Coldly, let us be intelligent.

Where we have reasons for what we believe, we have no need of faith; where we have no reasons, we have lost both our connection to the world and to one another.

There is no supernatural, there is only nature. Nature alone exists and contains all. All is. There is the part of nature that we perceive, and the part of nature that we do not perceive. ... If you abandon these facts, beware; charlatans will light upon them, also the imbecile. There is no mean: science, or ignorance. If science does not want these facts, ignorance will take them up. You have refused to enlarge human intelligence, you augment human stupidity. When Laplace withdraws Cagliostro appears.