Brave New World Quotes

“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.”

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

I am I, and I wish I weren’t.

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.

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

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.

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.

No social stability without individual stability.

Isn’t there something in living dangerously?

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.

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.

Ending is better than mending.

Pain was a fascinating horror.

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. . . .