Brave New World

„For particulars, as every one knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fret–sawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.”

„Ninety–six identical twins working ninety–six identical machines!”

„The lower the caste,”

„the shorter the oxygen.”

„All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.”

„We slacken off the circulation when they're right way up, so that they're half starved, and double the flow of surrogate when they're upside down. They learn to associate topsy–turvydom with well–being; in fact, they're only truly happy when they're standing on their heads.”

„Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy.”

„The principle had been discovered; but many, many years were to elapse before that principle was usefully applied.”

„You can't learn a science unless you know what it's all about.”

„wordless conditioning is crude and wholesale; cannot bring home the finer distinctions, cannot inculcate the more complex courses of behaviour. For that there must be words, but words without reason. In brief, hypnopædia.”

„when you're not accustomed to history, most facts about the past do sound incredible.”

„No wonder these poor pre–moderns were mad and wicked and miserable. Their world didn't allow them to take things easily, didn't allow them to be sane, virtuous, happy.”

„You can't consume much if you sit still and read books.”

„Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology.”

„Characters remain constant throughout a whole lifetime.”

„What a hideous colour khaki is,”

„Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.”

„The mockery made him feel an outsider; and feeling an outsider he behaved like one, which increased the prejudice against him and intensified the contempt and hostility aroused by his physical defects.”

„A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.”

„Did you ever feel,”

„as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out? Some sort of extra power that you aren't using–you know, like all the water that goes down the falls instead of through the turbines?”

„I'm thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feeling that I've got something important to say and the power to say it–only I don't know what it is, and I can't make any use of the power. If there was some different way of writing…Or else something else to write about…”

„Words can be like X–rays, if you use them properly–they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.”

„When people are suspicious with you, you start being suspicious with them.”

„Fine to think we can go on being socially useful even after we're dead. Making plants grow.”

„to be excited is still to be unsatisfied.”

„he hesitated, searching for words with which to express himself,”

„wouldn't you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else's way.”

„When the individual feels, the community reels,”

„He was a mine of irrelevant information and unasked–for good advice. Once started, he went on and on–boomingly.”

„they're perfectly tame; savages won't do you any harm. They've got enough experience of gas bombs to know that they mustn't play any tricks.”

„Lenina liked the drums. Shutting her eyes she abandoned herself to their soft repeated thunder, allowed it to invade her consciousness more and more completely, till at last there was nothing left in the world but that one deep pulse of sound.”

„when a child asks you how a helicopter works or who made the world–well, what are you to answer if you're a Beta and have always worked in the Fertilizing Room? What are you to answer?”

„he was also crying because people were so beastly and unfair, and because he was only a little boy and couldn't do anything against them. Linda was crying too. She was grown up, but she wasn't big enough to fight against three of them. It wasn't fair for her either.”

„A man can smile and smile and be a villain. Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain.”

„If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.”

„his insomnia had not been fruitless; he had a plan.”

„intellectual eminence carries with it corresponding moral responsibilities. The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray. It is better that one should suffer than that many should be corrupted.”

„The return to civilization was for her the return to soma, was the possibility of lying in bed and taking holiday after holiday, without ever having to come back to a headache or a fit of vomiting, without ever being made to feel as you always felt after peyotl, as though you'd done something so shamefully anti–social that you could never hold up your head again. Soma played none of these unpleasant tricks. The holiday it gave was perfect and, if the morning after was disagreeable, it was so, not intrinsically, but only by comparison with the joys of the holiday. The remedy was to make the holiday continuous. Greedily she clamoured for ever larger, ever more frequent doses. Dr. Shaw at first demurred; then let her have what she wanted. She took as much as twenty grammes a day.”

„Soma may make you lose a few years in time,”

„But think of the enormous, immeasurable durations it can give you out of time. Every soma–holiday is a bit of what our ancestors used to call eternity.”

„Of course,”

„you can't allow people to go popping off into eternity if they've got any serious work to do. But as she hasn't got any serious work…”

„Well, I'd rather be unhappy than have the sort of false, lying happiness you were having here.”

„One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.”

„I was trying to engineer them into feeling as I'd felt when I wrote the rhymes.”

„You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X–rayish phrases.”

„he repeated to himself, as though the words were a spell that would restore the dead past to life.”

„Ford helps those who help themselves.”

„Beauty's attractive, and we don't want people to be attracted by old things. We want them to like the new ones.”

„You can't make flivvers without steel–and you can't make tragedies without social instability. The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get. They're well off; they're safe; they're never ill; they're not afraid of death; they're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they're plagued with no mothers or fathers; they've got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there's soma.”

„that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead.”

„stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.”

„Alphas can be completely socialized–but only on condition that you make them do Alpha work. Only an Epsilon can be expected to make Epsilon sacrifices, for the good reason that for him they aren't sacrifices; they're the line of least resistance. His conditioning has laid down rails along which he's got to run. He can't help himself; he's foredoomed.”

„Each one of us, of course,”

„goes through life inside a bottle. But if we happen to be Alphas, our bottles are, relatively speaking, enormous. We should suffer acutely if we were confined in a narrower space. You cannot pour upper–caste champagne–surrogate into lower–caste bottles. It's obvious theoretically.”

„The optimum population,”

„is modelled on the iceberg–eight–ninths below the water line, one–ninth above.”

„we have our stability to think of. We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability. That's another reason why we're so chary of applying new inventions. Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy. Yes, even science.”

„I rather regret the science. Happiness is a hard master–particularly other people's happiness. A much harder master, if one isn't conditioned to accept it unquestioningly, than truth.”

„One can't consult one's own preference.”

„Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't.”

„What's the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you? That was when science first began to be controlled–after the Nine Years' War. People were ready to have even their appetites controlled then. Anything for a quiet life. We've gone on controlling ever since. It hasn't been very good for truth, of course. But it's been very good for happiness. One can't have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for. You're paying for it, Mr. Watson–paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty. I was too much interested in truth; I paid too.”

„I should like a thoroughly bad climate,”

„I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms, for example…”

„He would have liked to say something about solitude, about night, about the mesa lying pale under the moon, about the precipice, the plunge into shadowy darkness, about death. He would have liked to speak; but there were no words. Not even in Shakespeare.”

„God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.”

„You remind me of another of those old fellows called Bradley. He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons–that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to.”

„it is natural to believe in God when you're alone–quite alone, in the night, thinking about death…”

„The gods are just. No doubt. But their code of law is dictated, in the last resort, by the people who organize society; Providence takes its cue from men.”

„If you allowed yourselves to think of God, you wouldn't allow yourselves to be degraded by pleasant vices. You'd have a reason for bearing things patiently, for doing things with courage.”

„There isn't any need for a civilized man to bear anything that's seriously unpleasant.”

„You can't have a lasting civilization without plenty of pleasant vices.”

„Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears–that's what soma is.”

„You got rid of them. Yes, that's just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether 'tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them…But you don't do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It's too easy.”

„Anywhere. I don't care. So long as I can be alone.”

„The work gave him an intense pleasure. After those weeks of idleness in London, with nothing to do, whenever he wanted anything, but to press a switch or turn a handle, it was pure delight to be doing something that demanded skill and patience.”

„As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.”