Aldous Huxley Quotes

Futurism: This was a movement of intellectuals who wanted to replace tradition with the modern world of machinery, speed, violence, and public relations. It proves that we should be careful what intellectuals wish for, because we might get it.

Late-19th-century America, with all its chaotic change and immense potential, seems to have been the perfect place to become not someone else, but someone new.

Building the future holds more attraction than ancestor worship, whichever ancestor we're talking about.

Sometimes I'm dazzled by how modern and fabulous we are, and how easy everything can be for us; that's the gilded glow of technology, and I marvel at it all the time.

The speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalization is the speed of light.

Weirdly, there have been a lot of critics of conservatism, but very few critics of innovation. As a culture, we are deeply paranoid about politics, but we gaze upon innovation with rapturous adulation.

The modern minds in each generation are the critics who preserve us from a petrifying world, who will not leave us to walk undisturbed in the ways of our fathers.

Some people think technology has the answers.

One can not impede scientific progress.

But we moderns are impatient and destructive.

The idea of modernity is beginning to lose its vitality. It is losing it because modernity is no longer a critical attitude but an accepted, codified convention.

If someone is not tech savvy, I have no time for them. I've always been a big believer in looking forward.

Modernity is not a problem to be overcome but a challenge to be met.

The social revolution of the nineteenth century can not draw its poetry from the past, it can draw that only from the future.

I am not afraid of new inventions or improvements, nor bigoted to the practices of our forefathers. It is that bigotry which keeps the Indians in a state of barbarism in the midst of the arts and would have kept us in the same state even now

Globalization is the speed of light.

I wouldn’t give a nickel for all the history in the world. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today.

Everything new endangers something old. A new machine replaces human hands; a new source of power threatens old businesses; a new trade route wipes out the supremacy of old ports and brings prosperity to new ones. This is the price that must be paid for progress and it is worth it.

The move to modernity has its risks but the greater risk is not moving at all.

We are living in the jet-age, but we are governed by an Edwardian establishment mentality.

Horse-and-Carriage diplomacy, like governance by crowned heads selected by accident of birth, proved wholly inadequate to address a crisis of the Electric Age.

We presumably believe that most of the technological progress over the arc of humanity to date has been good. I don't see any argument to go back to 1600.

Modernity is disruptive, and I endorse that.

It's fun to sentimentalize the 20th-century lifestyle and the 20th-century brain, but it helps nobody, it makes you look ancient, there's no going back, and you'd be miserable if you did.

In a modern and innovative society, where advancements are plentiful and communication is instantaneous, science and technology are a part of everyday life.