Brave New World

by Aldous Huxley

“Community, Identity, Stability.”

The principle of mass production at last applied to biology.

“We also predestine and condition. We decant our babies as socialized human beings, as Alphas or Epsilons, as future sewage workers or future…” He was going to say “future World controllers,” but correcting himself, said “future Directors of Hatcheries,” instead.

“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.”

For you must remember that in those days of gross viviparous reproduction, children were always brought up by their parents and not in State Conditioning Centres.”)

“Moral education, which ought never, in any circumstances, to be rational.”

“But every one belongs to every one else,” he concluded, citing the hypnopædic proverb.

“I really do think you ought to be careful. It’s such horribly bad form to go on and on like this with one man. At forty, or thirty-five, it wouldn’t be so bad. But at your age, Lenina! No, it really won’t do.

“No pains have been spared to make your lives emotionally easy—to preserve you, so far as that is possible, from having emotions at all.”

“Our ancestors were so stupid and short-sighted that when the first reformers came along and offered to deliver them from those horrible emotions, they wouldn’t have anything to do with them.”

“Accompanied by a campaign against the Past; by the closing of museums, the blowing up of historical monuments (luckily most of them had already been destroyed during the Nine Years’ War); by the suppression of all books

“All crosses had their tops cut and became T’s. There was also a thing called God.”

“There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.”

“There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality.”

A chronic fear of being slighted made him avoid his equals,

A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.

“Yes, everybody’s happy now,” echoed Lenina. They had heard the words repeated a hundred and fifty times every night for twelve years.

Bernard considered that Electro-magnetic Golf was a waste of time. “Then what’s time for?” asked Lenina in some astonishment.

Walking and talking—that seemed a very odd way of spending an afternoon.

Everybody’s happy nowadays.”

“Yes, ‘Everybody’s happy nowadays.’ We begin giving the children that at five. 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.”

“why you don’t take soma when you have these dreadful ideas of yours. You’d forget all about them. And instead of feeling miserable, you’d be jolly. So jolly,”

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

“I want to know what passion is,”

“I want to feel something strongly.”

because progress is lovely, isn’t it?”

“Yes, and civilization is sterilization,”

Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself.

To say one was a mother—that was past a joke: it was an obscenity.

The return to civilization was for her the return to soma, was the possibility of lying in bed and taking holiday after holiday, without ever having to come back to a headache or a fit of vomiting, without ever being made to feel as you always felt after peyotl, as though you’d done something so shamefully anti-social that you could never hold up your head again. Soma played none of these unpleasant tricks.

“Soma may make you lose a few years in time,” the doctor went on. “But think of the enormous, immeasurable durations it can give you out of time.

“you can’t allow people to go popping off into eternity if they’ve got any serious work to do.

But as she hasn’t got any serious work…”

“Hug me till you drug me, honey; Kiss me till I’m in a coma: Hug me, honey, snuggly bunny; Love’s as good as soma.”

“What fun it would be,” he thought, “if one didn’t have to think about happiness!”

“Well, I’d rather be unhappy than have the sort of false, lying happiness you were having here.”

the worthlessness of friends who could be turned upon so slight a provocation into persecuting enemies.

One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.

“It’s flatly against all their sleep-teaching. Remember, they’ve had at least a quarter of a million warnings against solitude.”

Television was left on, a running tap, from morning till night.

“She’s my mother,” he said in a scarcely audible voice. The nurse glanced at him with startled, horrified eyes; then quickly looked away. From throat to temple she was all one hot blush.

“Don’t take that horrible stuff. It’s poison, it’s poison.”

“Poison to soul as well as body.”

“But do you like being slaves?”

“Don’t you want to be free and men? Don’t you even understand what manhood and freedom are?”

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.”

Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy.

all our science is just a cookery book, with an orthodox theory of cooking that nobody’s allowed to question, and a list of recipes that mustn’t be added to except by special permission from the head cook.

All the people who, for one reason or another, have got too self-consciously individual to fit into community-life.

a reality, an absolute and everlasting truth. Yes, we inevitably turn to God; for this religious sentiment is of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other losses.’ ”