Wit & Attitude Quote by Aldous Huxley

Huxley is doing something sly here: he frames resistance to new ideas not as a principled disagreement but as a low-grade fear response dressed up as common sense. The phrase "vast majority" is deliberately bruising. It’s not a polite diagnosis of human nature; it’s an accusation, meant to sting the complacent reader who assumes they’re the exception. By pairing "dislike" with "dread", he escalates unfamiliarity from mild preference to existential threat. That jump explains why the social reaction to innovation so often looks irrationally theatrical: mockery, scapegoating, persecution.

The subtext is a warning about how societies police the boundaries of the normal. "Innovators" aren’t just people with better ideas; they’re people who destabilize the shared story that keeps institutions, hierarchies, and identities intact. Calling them "fools and madmen" isn’t merely insult, it’s a containment strategy. If you can medicalize the new, you don’t have to argue with it. If you can make it ridiculous, you can make it harmless.

Context matters: Huxley lived through mass propaganda, the cult of expertise, and the bureaucratic management of life that would culminate in Brave New World. He understood that modernity doesn’t abolish persecution; it refines it. The crowd no longer needs torches when it has laughter, headlines, and credentialed dismissal. The intent isn’t to canonize every contrarian, either. It’s sharper: to show how quickly "unfamiliar" becomes "unthinkable" and how eagerly ordinary people participate in that conversion.