Aldous Huxley Quotes

I don't criticise anybody, but I just don't understand religion. Like I don't understand nationalism. These are the two things that cause wars. I don't understand why they are supposed to be good things.

If you want a war, nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men are ever subject, because doctrines get inside a man's reason and betray him against himself. Civilized men have done their fiercest fighting for doctrines.

We cannot sway extremists with rational thought or with our ideas of right and wrong.

A faith is something you die for, a doctrine is something you kill for. There is all the difference in the world.

Senseless violence is, almost by definition, hard to understand. Not that I can understand terrorists who kill from hate, but at least we can identify a reason - a terrifying one, to be sure, grounded in a violent belief system - for what they do. Two gangs go to war. Extremists kill in the name of belief.

All the religious wars that have caused blood to be shed for centuries arise from passionate feelings and facile counter-positions, such as Us and Them, good and bad, white and black.

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

How can you tell when a political ideology has become the equivalent of a religion?

Those prepared to die for the truth, as a rule make many others die with them, often before them, and at times instead of them.

There are pragmatic, sane politics or those convinced that God is on their side.

Blood is shed over politics, religion and the two in combination.

I personally am not religious. I think, put into the wrong hands, it's incredibly dangerous. It's the reason for most of the wars that have been fought around the world, and it's pretty ridiculous when you think about what they're actually arguing over.

For me, tribalism and religion are basically the big reasons we're in trouble. Patriotism, tribalism, and religion.

The extremists are talking too loudly, and everyone is convinced that only he is on the right side.

The reality is that religion, across the board, and in and of itself, neither provokes war nor promotes peace - and it is childish and naive, not to mention utopian, to believe otherwise.

In the past, most wars were motivated by the idea of nationhood. Today, however, wars are incited above all using religion as an excuse.

When you create a church, an institution, and you create a dogma. When you create an ideology, that's the danger. Communism, too, is a beautiful idea, but millions of people died when communism became an ideology.

If you want war, nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men ever are subject.

Earnest Freethinkers need not worry themselves so much about the persecutions of the past. Before the Liberal idea is dead or triumphant we shall see wars and persecutions the like of which the world has never seen.

When all is said and done, and statesmen discuss the future of the world, the fact remains that people fight these wars.

We don't like to kill our unborn; we need them to grow up and fight our wars.

If wars can be started by lies, they can be stopped by truth.

Terrible wars have been fought where millions have died for one idea - freedom. And it seems that something that means so much to so many people would be worth having.

A fanatic's willingness to kill or be killed in the service of a cause cannot prove the rightness of that cause.

[...] to introduce into the philosophy of war itself a principle of moderation would be an absurdity