Brave New World

by Aldous Huxley

At the time the book was written this idea, that human beings are given free will in order to choose between insanity on the one hand and lunacy on the other, was one that I found amusing and regarded as quite possibly true.

‘Bokanovsky’s Process is one of the major instruments of social stability!’

Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes; to abolish the love of nature, but not the tendency to consume transport.

‘Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending.’

Men who never had to shout at an Epsilon to get an order obeyed; men who took their position for granted; men who moved through the caste system as a fish through the water – so utterly at home as to be unaware either of themselves or of the beneficent and comfortable element in which they had their being.

The various Bureaux of Propaganda and the College of Emotional Engineering were housed in a single sixty-storey building in Fleet Street. In the basement and on the lower floors were the presses and offices of the three great London newspapers – The Hourly Radio, an upper caste sheet, the pale-green Gamma Gazette, and, on khaki paper and in words exclusively of one syllable, The Delta Mirror. Then came the Bureaux of Propaganda by Television, by Feeling Picture, and by synthetic Voice and Music respectively – twenty-two floors of them. Above were the research laboratories and the padded rooms in which the Sound-Track writers and Synthetic Composers did their delicate work. The top eighteen floors were occupied by the College of Emotional Engineering.