Aldous Huxley Quotes About Brave New World Character
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You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases.
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You can't make flivers without steel - and you can't make tragedies without social instability. The world's stable 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're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they're plagued with no mothers or fathers; they've got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they're so conditioned that they pratically can't help behaving as they ought to behave.
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We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters.
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It is natural to believe in God when you're alone-- quite alone, in the night, thinking about death.
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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.
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And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past, you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears-that's what soma is.
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"But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art.
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But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.
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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.
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God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.
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Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.
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Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning, truth and beauty can't.
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We can't allow science to undo its own good work.
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People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.
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If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.
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But every one belongs to every one else
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Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly color. I'm so glad I'm a Beta.
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"All right then," said the savage defiantly, I'm claiming the right to be unhappy." "Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." There was a long silence. "I claim them all," said the Savage at last.
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No social stability without individual stability.
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All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny.
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I'd rather be myself," he said. "Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.
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The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray.
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We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.
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Those who feel themselves despised do well to look despising.
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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.
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A love of nature keeps no factories busy.
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When the individual feels, the community reels.
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Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery.
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What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder.
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The mockery made him feel an outsider; and feeling an outsider he behaved like one, which increased the prejudice against him and intensified the contempt and hostility aroused by his physical defects. Which in turn increased his sense of being alien and alone. A chronic fear of being slighted made him avoid his equals, made him stand, where his inferiors were concerned, self-consciously on his dignity.
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