The grandson of TH Huxley, a famous Victorian scientist, and part of a family of famous public intellectuals, Aldous Huxley was a precociously gifted young man who grew up on the fringes of the Bloomsbury set.
In the 1920s, Huxley acquired a reputation for the kind of heartless, satirical fiction that appealed to the Waste Land Generation. Today, he is out of favor due to the uncomfortable accuracy of his predictions.
Aldous Huxley seems to have accurately predicted the current rapid deterioration of ethics, human rights, and ecological balance. His book Brave New World is a vision of a future human society controlled by global capitalism. The novel explores the consequences of mass industrialisation and the Americanisation of consumer society.
Quotations
The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.
— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
— Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception
That people do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.
Aldous Huxley, Collected Essays
...most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.
— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
