A Quote by Aldous Huxley

Generalized intelligence and mental alertness are the most powerful enemies of dictatorship and at the same time the basic conditions of effective democracy.

Aldous Huxley

Quote Topics

Alertness Basic Conditions Democracy Dictatorship Effective Enemies Intelligence Mental Most Most Powerful Powerful Same Same Time Time

Quote Author

Aldous Huxley
English - Writer
July 26, 1894 - November 22, 1963

Mental alertness is not awareness. Mental alertness only enhances your survival instincts. It does not take you towards liberation.

Jaggi Vasudev

The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting.

Charles Bukowski

All government is a mess. Democracy is always messy. It's meant to be messy because smooth, thoughtful, precise, effective government leads to dictatorship. Don't get me wrong, dictatorship is fine - as long as I'm the dictator. But if you're not the dictator, not so good.

Michael Capuano

We want no dictatorship of physicists, as physicists. If our democracy is to realize its full promise, we want no dictatorship at all - of any species. What we want and need is the enlightened and active interest of all men of intelligence and goodwill in their government, and their participation in its functions.

Jerome Frank

Planning leads to dictatorship because dictatorship is the most effective instrument of coercion and the enforcement of ideals and, as such, essential if central planning on a large scale is to be possible.

Friedrich August von Hayek

The transition from dictatorship to democracy is always very difficult, and if you read a history of any country that went through this, it wasn't easy. And, you know, you don't end dictatorship one day and next day you have fully fledged democracy.

Wael Ghonim

Believing in and practising the principles of the rule of law is, with our liberty and democracy, among the most powerful weapons we have. It is less effective if we blur its clarity and we should do this as sparingly as possible.

Dominic Grieve

There is a need for educators, young people, artists and other cultural workers to develop an educative politics in which people can address the historical, structural and ideological conditions at the core of the violence being waged by the corporate and repressive state and to make clear that government under the dictatorship of market sovereignty and power is no longer responsive to the most basic needs of young people - or most people for that matter.

Henry Giroux

In capitalist society we have a democracy that is curtailed, wretched, false, a democracy only for the rich, for the minority. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to communism, will for the first time create democracy for the people, for the majority, along with the necessary suppression of the exploiters, of the minority.

Vladimir Lenin

Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy.

Howard Zinn

The world has paid a heavy price for the lack of democracy in most of the Middle East. Operation Ajax [CIA code for the August 1953 coup] taught tyrants and aspiring tyrants there that the world's most powerful governments were willing to tolerate limitless oppression as long as oppressive regimes were friendly to the West and to Western oil companies. That helped tilt the political balance in a vast region away from freedom and toward dictatorship.

Stephen Kinzer

By means of the banking system the distribution of capital as a special business, a social function, is taken out of the hands of the private capitalists and usurers. But at the same time, banking and credit become the most effective means of driving captialist production beyond its own limits and one of the most effective vehicles of crises and swindle.

Karl Marx

The atomic bomb certainly is the most powerful of all weapons, but it is conclusively powerful and effective only in the hands of the nation which controls the sky.

Lyndon B. Johnson

I think in Pakistan there is already democracy and no dictatorship. And recently a few years ago, the Pakistani people stood against the dictatorship of [Pervez] Musharraf and compelled him to resign. So now it is the people's democracy so I don't think any chance that the people should stand against this administration. Pakistan's situation is different than Egypt. They cannot be compared.

Shahbaz Bhatti

Education is important even beyond the bounds of the opportunities it gives to the individual; it is a crucial and basic requirement for ensuring effective democracy and human rights.