One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.
— Aldous Huxley
Skyrocket Brave New World Technology quotations
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.
All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny.
Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning, truth and beauty can't.
When the individual feels, the community reels.
All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.
But every one belongs to every one else
We can't allow science to undo its own good work.
The gods are just. No doubt. But their code of law is dictated, in the last resort, by the people who organize society; Providence takes its cue from men.
I'd rather be myself," he said. "Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.
What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder.
All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.
"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.
In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.
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.
Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery.
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 is natural to believe in God when you're alone-- quite alone, in the night, thinking about death.
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.
Regular crises perpetuate the past by reinvigorating cycles which started long ago. In contrast, (capital-C) Crises are the past's death knell. They function like laboratories in which the future is incubated. They have given us agriculture and the industrial revolution, technology and the labour contract, killer germs and antibiotics. Once they strike, the past ceases to be a reliable predictor of the future and a brave new world is born.