Island

by Aldous Huxley

Were you ever interested in power?” he asked after a moment of silence. “Never.” Will shook his head emphatically. “One can’t have power without committing oneself.” “And for you the horror of being committed outweighs the pleasure of pushing other people around?” “By a factor of several thousand times.”

Apart from sewerage systems and synthetic vitamins, you don’t seem to do anything at all about prevention.

“I can see several possible reasons why. She might have loved you because…” Susila eyed him appraisingly and smiled. “Well, because you’re quite an attractive kind of queer fish.”

“To scoot or not to scoot, that is the question.”

Lenin used to say that electricity plus socialism equals communism. Our equations are rather different. Electricity minus heavy industry plus birth control equals democracy and plenty. Electricity plus heavy industry minus birth control equals misery, totalitarianism and war.”

“For us there’s no bliss, only the oscillation between happiness and terror and a sense of outrage at the thought that our pains are as integral a part of Nataraja’s dance as our pleasures, our dying as our living. Let’s quietly think about that for a little while.”

We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is to learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.

Dualism…Without it there can hardly be good literature. With it, there most certainly can be no good life.

For animals everywhere else, Satan, quite obviously, is Homo sapiens.”

We don’t have the money for large-scale research in physics and chemistry, and we don’t really have any practical need for that kind of research—no heavy industries to be made more competitive, no armaments to be made more diabolical, not the faintest desire to land on the backside of the moon. Only the modest ambition to live as fully human beings in harmony with the rest of life on this island at this latitude on this planet.

‘Do as you would be done by’ applies to our dealings with all kinds of life in every part of the world. We shall be permitted to live on this planet only for as long as we treat all nature with compassion and intelligence. Elementary ecology leads straight to elementary Buddhism.”

let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die.”

And now one of the nightmare machines, the female, had turned the small flat head, all mouth and bulging eyes, at the end of its long neck—had turned it and (dear God!) had begun to devour the head of the male machine. First a purple eye was chewed out, then half the bluish face. What was left of the head fell to the ground. Unrestrained by the weight of the eyes and jaws, the severed neck waved wildly. The female machine snapped at the oozing stump, caught it and, while the headless male uninterruptedly kept up his parody of Ares in the arms of Aphrodite, methodically chewed.

“One bright May morning, I swallowed four-tenths of a gram of mescalin…and sat down to wait for the results….”