Aldous Huxley Quotes

I think there are two ways in which people are controlled - first of all frighten people and secondly demoralize them.

The technique of a mass movement aims to infect people with a malady and then offer the movement as a cure.

Men. They were all so incredibly easy to sway. Pat them on their heads, give them something to eat, and they'll follow you anywhere. Add a smile and a few stupid compliments, and they'll immediately forget all about their other responsibilities.

I'm fascinated that people drawn to cults want to know what to do. And people want to know what to think. And people want to know how to feel. Not just what to feel but how to feel.

Assemble a mob of men and women previously conditioned by a daily reading of the newspapers; treat them to amplified band music, bright lights...and in next to no time you can reduce them to a state of almost mindless subhumanity. Never before have so few been in a position to make fools, maniacs, or criminals of so many.

It's easier to control people when they're afraid.

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

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

The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.

Dictatorship is a constant lecture instructing you that your feelings, your thoughts and desires are of no account, that you are a nobody and must live as you are told by other people who desire and think for you

The religious superstition is encouraged by means of the institution of churches, processions, monuments, festivities....The so-called clergy stupefy the masses....They befog the people and keep them in an eternal condition of stupefaction.

Good and decent people must be protected and persuaded by gentle means, but the rabble must be led by terror.

I think people have a need to feel good about the country they live in, but what's happening, I think, is that that need - which is a good thing - is getting manipulated and exploited.

People who want to manipulate you will fear your joy, because it's not easily controlled.

It's too easy to do a patriotic-themed show to crawl into people's hearts and minds.

Speaking of a future at most only decades away, an experimenter in intelligence control asserted, “I foresee a time when we shall have the means and therefore, inevitably, the temptation to manipulate the behavior and intellectual functioning of all the people through environmental and biochemical manipulation of the brain.

I don't like the kind of writer who's out to change the world and beat up on people for their own good. Stalin did that and Hitler did that, and to hell with them.

The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.

People only respond to fear.

No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?

It is very depressing to see that in the 21st century people are still using the same 1950s and '60s style of propaganda.

There have always been people like you, Nicholas Flamel. People who think they know what's best, who decide what people should see and read and listen to, who ultimately try to shape how the rest of the world think and acts. I've spent my entire life fighting the likes of you.

They maintain that only a dictatorship - their dictatorship, of course - can create the will of the people, while our answer to this is: No dictatorship can have any other aim but that of self-perpetuation, and it can beget only slavery in the people tolerating it; freedom can be created only by freedom, that is, by a universal rebellion on the part of the people and free organization of the toiling masses from the bottom up.

Anger makes people feel uncomfortable, because the minute somebody shows it, it puts you in a position where you can't laugh or make light of something... not to trivialise it I don't mean. But your reaction to anger is supposed to be fear or returned anger. So, you're really trying to control a situation when you show anger and it's a very weak position to take. It often works on people who aren't in a position to fight back.