Aldous Huxley Quotes

The class struggle, to which Marx has specially drawn attention, is a real factor, the tokens of which are to be found on every page of history. But the struggle is not confined only to two classes: the proletariat and the capitalist; it occurs between an infinite number of groups with different interests, and above all between the elites contending for power. The existence of these groups may vary in duration, they may be based on permanent or more or less temporary characteristics. In the most savage peoples, and perhaps in all, sex determines two of these groups.

Aristocracy is always cruel.

You got to remember that slavery's very complex. It has a lot of levels to it.

Who controls the present controls the past. There's a power structure, if you like, between the present and the past and the future, and that's what I'm interested in.

All dictators, the rich and famous, to the lowest security guard who holds a gun, easily forget that power is transitory.

The scum of the People are most Tyrannical when they get the Power, and treat their Betters with the greatest Insolence.

Islam is in principle egalitarian, and has always had problems with power.

The most arbitrary powers in history always hid under the claim of some impersonal logic—God, the laws of nature, the laws of the market—and they always overlooked the backlash when morally intolerable discrepancies became glaringly visible.

There is a kind of theme that runs through the modern world that human relationships should be looked at in terms of power relationships, in terms of the manipulation of power. That is one of the really wicked ways of looking at the world. It strips people of their humanness.

Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the sources of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed, and love of power.

… the unjust institutions which work so much misery and suffering to the masses have their root in governments, and owe their whole existence to the power derived from government.

The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's moral perceptions are known and conceded the world over; and a privileged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name.

It is not the misuse of power that is evil; the very existence of power is an evil.

The distribution of land determines the distribution of power.

The class which has the power to rob upon a large scale has also the power to control the government and legalize their robbery.

The historical method is often deemed conservative, because it traces the gradual and stately growth of our venerable institutions; but it may exercise a precisely opposite influence by showing the gross injustice which was blindly perpetrated during this growth.

As both an essayist and science fiction and fantasy novelist, I write about and for the future. I talk about the past to remind us that what we believe has always been true - that men and women are somehow static categories, or that men in power has always been the default, or that same-sex love affairs were always taboo - has not always been thus.

Only powerful people have liberty.

It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power — power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate.

Social change … almost inevitably leads to the rise of new political actors demanding a voice and a share of power.

The theory of politics that emerges from the political literature of the pre-Revolutionary years rests on the belief that what lay behind every political scene, the ultimate explanation of every political controversy, was the disposition of power

Instead of discussion and argument, brute force rises up to the rescue of discomfited error, and crushes truth and right into the dust. "Might makes right," and hoary folly totters on in her mad career escorted by armies and navies.

In rivers and bad governments, the lightest things swim to the top

The United States was famously founded as a government of limited powers; suspicion of concentrated private power has surged in periodic waves throughout its history.