Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
41 quotes
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
"Well, I’d rather be unhappy than have the sort of false, lying happiness you were having here."
"I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then," he added in a lower tone, "I ate my own wickedness."
"All crosses had their tops cut and became T's. There was also a thing called God."
"Imagine a factory staffed by Alphas—that is to say by separate and unrelated individuals of good heredity and conditioned so as to be capable (within limits) of making a free choice and assuming responsibilities. Imagine it!"
"I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example..."
"... science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy."
"And whatever troubled him and showed in his face might have been the same old trouble - the problem of occupying space in the world and having a name people could call you by, being somebody they thought they could know"
"This concern with the basic condition of freedom -- the absence of physical constraint -- is unquestionably necessary, but is not all that is necessary. It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison and yet not free -- to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national State, or of some private interest within the nation, want him to think, feel and act."
"What would it be like if I were free, not enslaved by my conditioning?"
"Every change is a menace to stability."
"One can’t have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for. You’re paying for it, Mr. Watson - paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty."
"Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't. And, of course, whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered."
"Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books."
"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."
"Nature is powerless to put asunder."
"Pain was a fascinating horror"
"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."
"I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly."
"He woke once more to external reality, looked round him, knew what he saw- knewit, with a sinking sense of horror and disgust, for the recurrent deliriumof his days and nights, the nightmare of swarming indistinguishable sameness."
"Orgy-porgy, round and round and round, beating one another in six-eight time."
"Home, home - a few small rooms, stiflingly over-inhabited by a man, by a periodically teeming woman, by rabble of boys and girls of all ages. No air, no space; an understerilized prison; darkness, disease and smells."
"There was something called Christianity."
"What fun it would be," he thought, "if one didn't have to think about happiness!"
"If one's different, one's bound to be lonely."
"Her cheeks were flushed. She caught hold of the Savage's arm and pressed it, limp, against her side. He looked down at her for a moment, pale, pained, desiring, and ashamed of his desire. He was not worthy, not... Their eyes for a moment met. What treasures hers promised! A queen's ransom of temperament. Hastily he looked away, disengaged his imprisoned arm. He was obscurely terrified lest she should cease to be something he could feel himself unworthy of."