Brave New World

by Aldous Huxley

'I'd rather be myself,' he said. 'Myself and unhappy. Not somebody else, however cheerful.'

He stopped, 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.

But wouldn't you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else's way.'

A person's ability and right to pursue happiness

He found an extraordinary pleasure in making things with his hands and in learning every time to do them better.

'Because our world is not Othello's world. You can't write sad stories where there is no unhappiness. The world's peaceful now. People are happy. They get what they want, and they never want what they can't get. They're well off. They're safe. They're never ill. They're not afraid of death. They know nothing of passion and old age. They don't have to worry about mothers and fathers. They've got no wives, or children, or loved ones to feel strongly about. They're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there's soma. Which you go and throw out of the window in the name of freedom, Mr Savage. Freedom!' He laughed. 'Expecting Deltas to know what freedom is! And now expecting them to understand Othello! How can you have such an ideal'

The Savage shook his head. 'It all seems to me quite horrible.' 'Of course it does. Happiness is never as exciting as unhappiness or the struggles of great passions. Happiness is never grand.'

'Art, science - you seem to have paid a fairly high price for your happiness,' said the Savage

In the modern world we've got youth and happiness right up to the end. What follows? Evidently, that we can be independent of God. "Religious feeling will make up to us all our losses", says the writer of one of these old books. But we haven't any losses to be made up. We don't need religious feeling.'

'Then you think there is no God?' 'No, I think there quite probably is one.' 'Then why-?' Mustapha Mond cut him short. 'But he shows himself in different ways to different men. In the old times he showed himself as the being that's described in these books. Now-' 'How does he show himself now?' asked the Savage. 'Well, he shows himself as if he weren't there at all. Where there is comfort there is no need for God.'

'But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I ...

'In fact,' said Mustapha Mond, 'you're claiming the right to be unhappy.' 'All right, then,' said the Savage, 'I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.' 'Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and weak; the right to suffer disease; the right to have too little to eat; the right to live in constant fear of what may happen tomorrow; the right to fall a victim ...