A Clockwork Orange

by Anthony Burgess

is it better for a man to choose to be bad than to be conditioned to be good?

You were not put on this earth just to get in touch with God. That sort of thing could sap all the strength and the goodness out of a chelloveck.

The question is whether such a technique can really make a man good. Goodness comes from within, 6655321. Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.’

What does God want? Does God want woodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?

And yet, in a sense, in choosing to be deprived of the ability to make an ethical choice, you have in a sense really chosen the good. So I shall like to think.

It’s funny how the colours of the like real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen.

‘Oh, I’m dying,’ I like moaned. ‘Oh, I have a ghastly pain in my side. Appendicitis, it is. Ooooooh.’ ‘Appendy shitehouse,’ grumbled this veck,

‘Choice,’ rumbled a rich deep goloss. I viddied it belonged to the prison charlie. ‘He has no real choice, has he? Self-interest, fear of physical pain, drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice.’

They have turned you into something other than a human being. You have no power of choice any longer. You are committed to socially acceptable acts, a little machine capable only of good.

‘But the essential intention is the real sin. A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man.’