The Director Quotes

A love of nature keeps no factories busy.

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.

‘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.”

“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!