Brave New World Quotes

Every one works for every one else. We can’t do without any one. Even Epsilons are useful. We couldn’t do without Epsilons. Every one works for every one else. We can’t do without any one. . . .

I am I, and I wish I weren’t.

If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery.

One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.

But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.

I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.

Stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability.

I like being myself. Myself and nasty.

Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment.

If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

No social stability without individual stability.

I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then, I ate my own wickedness.

Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.

A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.

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 or 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.

Nothing costs enough here.

There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality.

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.

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.

A love of nature keeps no factories busy.

Isn’t there something in living dangerously?

Pain was a fascinating horror.

Ending is better than mending.

“For in the end, [Huxley] was trying to tell us what afflicted the people in ‘Brave New World’ was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.”

For particulars, as every one knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils.

‘You really know where you are. For the first time in history.’ He quoted the planetary motto. ‘Community, Identity, Stability.’ Grand words. ‘If we could bokanovskify indefinitely the whole problem would be solved.

Result: they’re decanted as freemartins--structurally quite normal (except, he had to admit, that they do have just the slightest tendency to grow beards), but sterile. Guaranteed sterile. Which brings us at last,” continued Mr. Foster, “out of the realm of mere slavish imitation of nature into the much more interesting world of human invention.”

‘Hasn’t it occurred to you that an Epsilon embryo must have an Epsilon environment as well as an Epsilon heredity? It evidently hadn’t occurred to him. He was covered with confusion.”

‘The lower the caste,’ said Mr. Foster, ‘the shorter the oxygen.’

“And that,′ put in the Director sententiously, ‘that is the secret of happiness and virtue--liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.’

What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder. ‘They’ll grow up with what the psychologists used to call an “instinctive” hatred of books and flowers. Reflexes unalterably conditioned. They’ll be safe from books and botany all their lives.’

‘We condition the masses to hate the country,’ concluded the Director. ‘But simultaneously we condition them to love all country sports.’

‘Moral education, which ought never, in any circumstances, to be rational.’

’Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too--all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides--made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions!

Mustapha Mond! The Resident Controller for Western Europe! One of the Ten World Controllers. One of the Ten...and he sat down on the bench with the D.H.C., he was going to stay, to stay, yes, and actually talk to them... straight from the horse’s mouth.

Try to imagine what “living with one’s family” meant.′ They tried; but obviously without the smallest success. ‘And do you know what a “home” was?’ They shook their heads.

Ending is better than mending.

‘I’d simply love to come with you for a week in July,’ she went on. (Anyhow, she was publicly proving her unfaithfulness to Henry. Fanny ought to be pleased, even though it was Bernard.) ‘That is,’ Lenina gave him her most deliciously significant smile, ‘if you still want to have me.’

He couldn’t look more upset if I’d made a dirty joke--asked him who his mother was, or something like that.

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

“Well, now she had said it and he was still wretched--wretched that she should have thought it such a perfect afternoon for Obstacle Golf, that she should have trotted away to join Henry Foster, that she should have found him funny for not wanting to talk of their most private affairs in public.”

‘Did you ever feel,’ he asked, ‘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...”

″‘You see,’ he went on at last, ‘I’m pretty good at inventing phrases--you know, the sort of words that suddenly make you jump, almost as though you’d sat on a pin, they seem so new and exciting even though they’re about something hypnopædically obvious. But that doesn’t seem enough. It’s not enough for the phrases to be good; what you make with them ought to be good too.‘”

″‘Oh, as far as they go.’ Helmholtz shrugged his shoulders. ‘But they go such a little way. They aren’t important enough, somehow. I feel I could do something much more important. Yes, and more intense, more violent. But what? What is there more important to say?

Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly--they’ll go through anything.

But what on earth’s the good of being pierced by an article about a Community Sing, or the latest improvement in scent organs? Besides, can you make words really piercing--you know, like the very hardest X-rays--when you’re writing about that sort of thing? Can you say something about nothing?

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

Every one works for every one else. We can’t do without any one. Even Epsilons are useful. We couldn’t do without Epsilons. Every one works for every one else. We can’t do without any one...

″‘I’m glad I’m not an Epsilon,’ said Lenina, with conviction. ‘And if you were an Epsilon,’ said Henry, ‘your conditioning would have made you no less thankful that you weren’t a Beta or an Alpha.‘”

Some men are almost rhinoceroses; they don’t respond properly to conditioning.

Walking and talking--that seemed a very odd way of spending an afternoon.

″‘But I do,’ he insisted. ‘It makes me feel as though...’ he hesitated, searching for words with which to express himself, ‘as though I were more me, if you see what I mean. More on my own, not so completely a part of something else. Not just a cell in the social body.‘”

“I am free. Free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody’s happy nowadays.”

“Never put off till to-morrow the fun you can have to-day.”

″‘Listen, I beg you,’ cried the Savage earnestly. ‘Lend me your ears...’ He had never spoken in public before, and found it very difficult to express what he wanted to say. ‘Don’t take that horrible stuff. It’s poison, it’s poison.’ Poison to soul as well as body.‘”

“Don’t you want to be free and men? Don’t you even understand what manhood and freedom are?”

We believe in happiness and stability.

You cannot pour upper-caste champagne-surrogate into lower-caste bottles.′

Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy.

’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.

Because it is idiotic. Writing when there’s nothing to say...

″‘What a hideous colour khaki is,’ remarked Lenina, voicing the hypnopædic prejudices of her caste.”

″‘My word,’ said Lenina, ‘I’m glad I’m not a Gamma.‘”

“All men are physico-chemically equal,”

“Every one belongs to every one else, after all.”

‘Government’s an affair of sitting, not hitting. You rule with the brains and the buttocks, never with the fists. For example, there was the conscription of consumption.’