Aldous Huxley Quotes

One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons-that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.

A mind virus is different in that there is no form to it; these are ideas placed in our heads when we are little. We get programmed by well-meaning people like our parents and their parents, our culture, religions and schools. We get conditioned to believe in our limitations and what's not possible.

Man is so made that if he is told often enough that he is a fool he believes it.

Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience.

We willingly accept and even embrace this mind control, and probably without even knowing it.

It is with this as with religion: one usually believes what he has been taught.

I think that you form the way that you act from others around you; it's a kind of an environmental thing.

The way brainwashing works is subtle and takes a long time.

What you hear repeatedly you will eventually believe.

Scientology delivers what it promises under the guise of tearing away falsity, neuroses, psychoses. It creates a brainwashed, robotic version of you. It's a 'Matrix' of you, so you're communicating with people all the time using Scientology.

Propaganda tries to surround man by all possible routes in the realm of feelings as well as ideas, by playing on his will or on his needs, through his conscious and his unconscious, assailing him in both his private and his public life. It furnishes him with a complete system for explaining the world, and provides immediate incentives to action.

It is society which, fashioning us in its image, fills us with religious, political, and moral beliefs that control our actions.

Of course, Behaviorism 'works'. So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviorist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.

Physical restraint is an obvious condition, which seems particularly useful in defining freedom, but with respect to important issues, it is a metaphor and not a very good one. People are indeed controlled by fetters, handcuffs, strait jackets, and the walls of jails and concentration camps, but what may be called behavioral control--the restraint imposed by contingencies of reinforcement--is a very different thing.

It's their belief, their own will, that holds people in Scientology, even oftentimes when they have been abused.

Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling from others.

There are absolutely ways to manipulate behavior, because our behavior is endlessly being manipulated by the world around us.

Psychologically, when you hear something a number of times, you start to believe it.

What one heart finds hard to believe, a hundred find easy.

Cults make people sing so hard for so long - because it over-oxygenates the blood and sets them up to faint.

Man has got to take charge of Man.... Then real education, including pre-natal education. By real education I mean one that has no 'take-it-or-leave-it' nonsense. A real education makes the patient what it wants infallibly: whatever he or his parents try to do about it. Of course, it'll have to be mainly psychological at first. But we'll get on to biochemical conditioning int he end and direct manipulation of the brain.

I'm not trying to twist people's heads around. I'm not trying to say, "Believe in me."

I think that man is conditioned to violence.

It is a surprising fact that those who object most violently to the manipulation of behaviour nevertheless make the most vigorous effort to manipulate minds.

We don't attach to people or to things; we attach to uninvestigated concepts that we believe to be true in the moment.