Aldous Huxley Quotes

There is no principle worth the name if it is not wholly good.

Right is right, even if everyone is against it, and wrong is wrong, even if everyone is for it.

A mistake made by many people with great convictions is that they will let nothing stand in the way of their views, not even kindness.

Those who believe that they have absolute truth and the only moral system are destructive both to themselves and to those whom they try to convert.

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.

Terrorists are dangerous, not because they are immoral or amoral but because they are hyper moral. They justify their behavior in profoundly moral language.

The pleasures of moral purity are available to those who fancy themselves a small-church militant in an unconverted world.

The problem with absolutist beliefs that they can get you into traps in which the ends justify the means.

Saint-Just's lips were believed to be pure. There was faith in him because of his reputation for asceticism and Spartan frugality. He had been an example of all the civic virtues. The purity of morals which he passionately demanded was no more than that which he practiced himself

Truth is not half way between right and wrong;

The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There's not one of them which won't make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it isn't. If you leave out justice you'll find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials "for the sake of humanity" and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man.

Morality crusades unite military regimes and religious zealots alike.

A lie doesn't become truth, wrong doesn't become right and evil doesn't become good, just because it's accepted by a majority.

Reformers who are obsessed with purity and cannot see that their obsession is impure.

My crime is that I will not go with the multitude to do evil. My singularity is that when I say that freedom is of God and slavery is of the devil, I mean just what I say. My fanaticism is that I insist on the American people abolishing slavery, or ceasing to prate on the rights of man.

If it be honor in your wars to seem The same you are not,--which, for your best ends, You adopt your policy--how is it less or worse, That it shall hold companionship in peace With honour, as in war: since that to both It stands in like request?

In our modern complex world, fundamentalism is dangerous because of its rigidity and its imperviousness to other ideas.

You can't slice up morals.

Right is right, and wrong is wrong, in small things as well as in big things.

The more one is absorbed in fighting evil, the less one is tempted to place the good in question.

Virtue is not a thing you can have by halves; it is or it is not.

There can be no justification for choosing any part of that which one knows to be evil.

Only religious fanatics and totalitarian states equate morality with legality.

When you are committed to doing what’s right, you are sowing seeds for God’s blessings. You will never go wrong by taking the high road and doing more that is required.

Let's not have a double standard. One standard will do just fine.