Aldous Huxley Quotes

Do you trust in your fellow citizens, in a sense that whatever they will have in additional tools they will use in balance more to the good or more to the bad? If you think they will use it more to the bad, you shouldn't do science, you know.

Scientists surely have a special responsibility. It is their ideas that form the basis of new technology. They should not be indifferent to the fruits of their ideas. They should forgo experiments that are risky or unethical.

Bioethics is a very, very important field. As we get more and more in the arena of understanding science and getting better opportunities, the fact that you can do things with biological sciences that have an impact on a human being means you must have ethical standards.

Science is not inherently good.

There is an ever-widening gap between what science allows and what we should actually do. There are many doors science can open that should be kept closed, on prudential or ethical grounds.

Science without conscience is the death of the soul.

Though many have tried, no one has ever yet explained away the decisive fact that science, which can do so much, cannot decide what it ought to do.

There are lots of things that science will enable us to do that we shouldn’t do.

It is not clear to anyone, least of all the practitioners, how science and technology in their headlong course do or should influence ethics and law, education and government, art and social philosophy, religion and the life of the affections. Yet science is an all-pervasive energy, for it is at once a mode of thought, a source of strong emotion, and a faith as fanatical as any in history.

Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.

To discuss evil in a manner implying neutrality, is to sanction it.

Science is turning into a monastery for the Order of Capitulant Friars. Logical calculus is supposed to supersede man as moralist. We submit to the blackmail of the 'superior knowledge' that has the temerity to assert that nuclear war can be, by derivation, a good thing, because this follows from simple arithmetic.

Good biology without good philosophy will be a calamity.

You do not settle whether an argument is justified by merely showing that it is of some use. The distinction is not between useful and useless experiments but between barbarous and civilized behaviour. Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character.

Science without conscience is the soul's perdition.

The rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its own. Naturally, it may be used by evil men for evil purposes, but there are more good men than evil, and while the latter cannot be persuaded to the path of righteousness by propaganda, they can certainly be corrected by good men with rifles.

Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character.

Evil into the mind of god or man may come and go, so unapproved, and leave no spot or blame behind.

The refusal to take sides on great moral issues is itself a decision. It is a silent acquiescence to evil. The Tragedy of our time is that those who still believe in honesty lack fire and conviction, while those who believe in dishonesty are full of passionate conviction.

But magic is neither good nor evil. It is a tool, like a knife. Is a knife evil? Only if the wielder is evil.

If you want to do evil, science provides the most powerful weapons to do evil; but equally, if you want to do good, science puts into your hands the most powerful tools to do so

Science for the Citizen is ... also written for the large and growing number of adolescents, who realize that they will be the first victims of the new destructive powers of science misapplied.

Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a god.

We must learn that passively to accept an unjust system is to cooperate with that system, and thereby to become a participant in its evil.

The devil tempts us not--'tis we tempt him, Reckoning his skill with opportunity.