Brave New World Quotes

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

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.

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, 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.

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

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

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 believe in God.

Kiss me till I'm in a coma. Hug me, honey, snuggly.

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

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

that is the secret of happiness and virtue—liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their un-escapable social destiny.

Was and will make me ill, I take a gramme and only am. 

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.

Success went fizzily to Bernard’s head, and in the process completely reconciled him (as any good intoxicant should do) to a world which, up till then, he had found very unsatisfactory.

Bernard was duly grateful (it was an enormous comfort to have his friend again) and also duly resentful (it would be pleasure to take some revenge on Helmholtz for his generosity).

Christianity without tears—that’s what soma is.

If you’re a human being, you’ll be seeing something of both, because we’ve always wanted things both ways.

You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.

The students nodded, emphatically agreeing with a statement which upwards of sixty-two thousand repetitions in the dark had made them accept, not merely as true, but as axiomatic, self-evident, utterly indisputable.

How can you talk about not wanting to be a part of the social body? We can't do without anyone!

the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.

From the ranks of the crawling babies came little squeals of excitement, gurgles and twitterings of pleasure.

Never put off till to-morrow the fun you can have today,

The machine turns, turns and must keep on turning—for ever. It is death if it stands still. A thousand millions scrabbled the crust of the earth. The wheels began to turn. In a hundred and fifty years there were two thousand millions. Stop all the wheels. In a hundred and fifty weeks there are once more only a thousand millions; a thousand thousand thousand men and women have starved to death.

But 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.

Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.

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.

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

But all the same, insisted the Savage, it is natural to believe in God when you’re alone—quite alone, in the night, thinking about death … But people never are alone now, said Mustapha Mond. We make them hate solitude; and we arrange their lives so that it’s almost impossible for them ever to have it.

But God doesn’t change. Men do, though. What difference does that make? All the difference in the world,

Where there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended—there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense. But there aren’t any wars nowadays.

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.

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. Doesn't it make you feel like that, Lenina?

I want to know what passion is," she heard him saying. "I want to feel something strongly.

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

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

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.

He continued, slowly, by a process of osmosis and white knowledge (which is like white noise, only more useful), to comprehend the city, a process that accelerated when he realized that the actual City of London itself was no bigger than a square mile.

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 turbines?

Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness: it depends on the force of the current, the height and strength of the barrier. The unchecked stream flows smoothly down its appointed channels into a calm well-being.

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.

He held out his right hand in the moonlight. From the cut on his wrist the blood was still oozing. Every few seconds a drop fell, dark, almost colourless in the dead light. Drop, drop, drop. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. . .He had discovered the Time and Death and God.

You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We’ve sacrificed the high art.

Reuben was the child of Polish-speaking parents.’ The Director interrupted himself. ‘You know what Polish is, I suppose?’ ‘A dead language.

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.

That which had made Helmholtz so uncomfortably aware of being himself and all alone was too much ability.

He would think of Heaven and London and Our Lady of Acoma and the rows and rows of babies in clean bottles and Jesus flying up and Linda flying up and the great Director of World hatcheries and Awonawilona.

How does he manifest himself now? asked the Savage. Well, he manifests himself as an absence; as though he weren’t there at all.

Imagine a factory staffed by Alphas—that is to say by separate and unrelated individuals of good heredity and conditioned so as to be capable (within limits) of making a free choice and assuming responsibilities. Imagine it!

Yes," Mustapha Mond was saying, "that's another item in the cost of stability. It isn't only art that's incompatible with happiness; it's also science. Science is dangerous; we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.

Shut lips, sleeping faces,Every stopped machine,The dumb and littered placesWhere crowds have been:.All silences rejoice,Weep (loudly or low),Speak-but with the voiceOf whom, I do not know.