Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is about a dystopian future in which pleasure is valued more than freedom and individuality.
They have limited intellectual pursuits. And people are limited in their planned roles.
But some people are unhappy and question this new world.
Will the brave new world learn the error of its ways? Or will they remain slaves to their empty pleasures?
Brave New World Quotes With Page Numbers
“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.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: The Director, Chapter 1, Page 10
“That is the secret of happiness and virtue — liking what you’ve got to do.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: The Director, Chapter 1, Page 10
“A love of nature keeps no factories busy.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Charater: The Narrator, Chapter 2, Page 14
“Mother, monogamy, romance. High spurts the fountain; fierce and foamy the wild jet. The urge has but a single outlet. My love, my baby. No wonder those poor pre-moderns were mad and wicked and miserable. Their world didn’t allow them to take things easily, didn’t allow them to be sane, virtuous, happy. What with mothers and lovers, what with the prohibitions they were not conditioned to obey, what with the temptations and the lonely remorses, what with all the diseases and the endless isolating pain, what with the uncertainties and the poverty—they were forced to feel strongly. And feeling strongly (and strongly, what was more, in solitude, in hopelessly individual isolation), how could they be stable?”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: The Narrator, Chapter 3, Page 27
“No social stability without individual stability.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: Mustapha Mond, Chapter 3, Page 28
“Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness: it depends on the force of the current, the height and strength of the barrier. The unchecked stream flows smoothly down its appointed channels into a calm well being.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: The Narrator, Chapter 3, Page 29
“Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: Propagando repeated by a voice, Chapter 3, Page 33
“Ending is better than mending.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: Propagando repeated by a voice, Chapter 3, Pages 33, 35
“There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.”
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“There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality.”
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“But they used to take morphia and cocaine.”
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“Two thousand pharmacologists and biochemists were subsidized in A.F. 178.”
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“Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug.”
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“Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant.”
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“All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.”
…
“Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology.”
…
“Stability was practically assured.”~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: Propagando repeated by a voice, Chapter 3, Pages 35, 36
“Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: The Narrator, Chapter 4, Page 42
“I am I, and I wish I weren’t.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: Bernard, Chapter 4, Page 43
“Did you ever feel…as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out? Some sort of extra power that you aren’t using – you know, like all the water that goes down the falls instead of through the turbines?”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: Helmholtz Watson, Chapter 4, Page 46
“I’m pretty good at inventing phrases- you know, the sort of words that suddenly make you jump, almost as though you’d sat on a pin, they seem so new and exciting even though they’re about something hypnopaedically obvious. But that doesn’t seem enough. It’s not enough for the phrases to be good; what you make with them ought to be good too…I feel I could do something much more important. Yes, and more intense, more violent. But what? What is there more important to say? And how can one be violent about the sort of things one’s expected to write about? Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly-they’ll go through anything. You read them and you’re pierced. That’s one of the things I try to teach my students-how to write piercingly. But what on earth’s the good of being pierced by an article about a Community Sing, or the latest improvement in scent organs? Besides, can you make words really piercing-you know, like the very hardest X-rays when you’re writing about that sort of thing? Can you say something about nothing?”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Characters: Helmholtz Watson and Bernard Marx, Chapter 4, Page 46
“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.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: The Narrator, Chapter 4, Page 46
“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, (Character: Helmholtz Watson), Chapter 4, Page 47
“When people are suspicious with you, you start being suspicious with them.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: Bernard Marx, Chapter 4, Page 47
“Can you say something about nothing?”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: Helmholtz Watson, Chapter 4, Page 47
“To be excited is still to be unsatisfied.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: Fifi Bradlaugh, Chapter 5, Page 57
“I’d rather be myself,” he said. “Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: Bermard Marx, Chapter 6, Page 59
“I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: Bernard Marx, Chapter 6, Page 62
“Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: Lenina, Chapter 6, Page 62
“A man can smile and smile and be a villain.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: The Narrator about John, Chapter 8, Page 89
“If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: John, Chapter 8, Page 92
“O brave new world that has such people in it.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: John, Chapter 9, Pages 94, and 107
“It was a masterly piece of work. But once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose— well, you didn’t know what the result might be. It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes—make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true. But not, in the present circumstance, admissible.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: Mustapha Mond, Chapter 12, Page 119
“Well, I’d rather be unhappy than have the sort of false, lying happiness you were having here.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: The Savage, Chapter 12, Page 120
“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.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: The Narrator, Chapter 12, Page 121
“I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example…”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: Helmholtz Watson, Chapter 14, Page 136
“One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: Mustapha Mond, Chapter 14, Page 139
“We don’t want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: Mustapha Mond, Chapter 16, Page 153
“It isn’t only art that is incompatible with happiness, it’s also science. Science is dangerous, we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: Mustapha Mond, Chapter 16, Page 153
“Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning, truth and beauty can’t.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: Mustapha Mond, Chapter 16, Page 155
“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. I was too much interested in truth; I paid too.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: Mustapha Mond, Chapter 16, Page 155
“What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: Mustapha Mond, Chapter 16, Page 155
“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.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: The Savage reading from a book, Chapter 17, Page 157
“They’re old; they’re about God hundreds of years ago. Not about God now”
“But God doesn’t change”
“Men do though”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: The Savage and Mustapha Mond, Chapter 17, Page 157
“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. We are God’s property. Is it not our happiness thus to view the matter? Is it any happiness or any comfort, to consider that we are our own? It may be thought so by the young and prosperous. These may think it a great thing to have everything, as they suppose, their own way–to depend on no one–to have to think of nothing out of sight, to be without the irksomeness of continual acknowledgment, continual prayer, continual reference of what they do to the will of another. But as time goes on, they, as all men, will find that independence was not made for man–that it is an unnatural state–will do for a while, but will not carry us on safely to the end …'” Mustapha Mond paused, put down the first book and, picking up the other, turned over the pages. “Take this, for example,” he said, and in his deep voice once more began to read: “‘A man grows old; he feels in himself that radical sense of weakness, of listlessness, of discomfort, which accompanies the advance of age; and, feeling thus, imagines himself merely sick, lulling his fears with the notion that this distressing condition is due to some particular cause, from which, as from an illness, he hopes to recover. Vain imaginings! That sickness is old age; and a horrible disease it is. They say that it is the fear of death and of what comes after death that makes men turn to religion as they advance in years. But my own experience has given me the conviction that, quite apart from any such terrors or imaginings, the religious sentiment tends to develop as we grow older; to develop because, as the passions grow calm, as the fancy and sensibilities are less excited and less excitable, our reason becomes less troubled in its working, less obscured by the images, desires and distractions, in which it used to be absorbed; whereupon God emerges as from behind a cloud; our soul feels, sees, turns towards the source of all light; turns naturally and inevitably; for now that all that gave to the world of sensations its life and charms has begun to leak away from us, now that phenomenal existence is no more bolstered up by impressions from within or from without, we feel the need to lean on something that abides, something that will never play us false–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.'” Mustapha Mond shut the book and leaned back in his chair. “One of the numerous things in heaven and earth that these philosophers didn’t dream about was this” (he waved his hand), “us, the modern world. ‘You can only be independent of God while you’ve got youth and prosperity; independence won’t take you safely to the end.’ Well, we’ve now got youth and prosperity right up to the end. What follows? Evidently, that we can be independent of God. ‘The religious sentiment will compensate us for all our losses.’ But there aren’t any losses for us to compensate; religious sentiment is superfluous. And why should we go hunting for a substitute for youthful desires, when youthful desires never fail? A substitute for distractions, when we go on enjoying all the old fooleries to the very last? What need have we of repose when our minds and bodies continue to delight in activity? of consolation, when we have soma? of something immovable, when there is the social order?”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Characters: The Savage and Mustapha Mond, Chapter 17, Page 157-59
“The Savage interrupted him. “But isn’t it natural to feel there’s a God?”
“You might as well ask if it’s natural to do up one’s trousers with zippers,” said the Controller sarcastically. “You remind me of another of those old fellows called Bradley. He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons–that’s philosophy. People believe in God because they’ve been conditioned to believe in God.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Characters: The Savage and Mustapha Mond, Chapter 17, Page 159
“God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make a choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: Mustapha Mond to the Savage, Chapter 17, Page 159
“It is natural to believe in God when you’re alone– quite alone, in the night, thinking about death.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: The Savage, Chapter 17, Pages 159, 160
“The Savage nodded, frowning. “You got rid of them. Yes, that’s just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether ’tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows or outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them…But you don’t do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It’s too easy.”
…”What you need,” the Savage went on, “is something with tears for a change. Nothing costs enough here.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: The Savage, Chapter 17, Page 160
“In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. When there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended – there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense. But there aren’t any wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving anyone too much. There’s no such thing as a divided allegiance; you’re so conditioned that you can’t help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren’t any temptations to resist. And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. 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 mortality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears – that’s what soma is.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: Mustapha Mond, Chapter 17, Pages 161, 162
“I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: The Savage, Chapter 17, Page 163
“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.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: The Savage, Chapter 17, Page 163
“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.’
‘In fact,’ said Mustapha Mond, ‘you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.’
‘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.
Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. ‘You’re welcome,” he said.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Characters: The Savage and Mustapha Mond, Chapter 17, Page 163
“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.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Characters: The Savage and Mustapha Mond, Chapter 17, Page 163
“Isn’t there something in living dangerously?’
There’s a great deal in it,’ the Controller replied. ‘Men and women must have their adrenals stimulated from time to time.’
What?’ questioned the Savage, uncomprehending.
It’s one of the conditions of perfect health. That’s why we’ve made the V.P.S. treatments compulsory.’
V.P.S.?’
Violent Passion Surrogate. Regularly once a month. We flood the whole system with adrenin. It’s the complete physiological equivalent of fear and rage. All the tonic effects of murdering Desdemona and being murdered by Othello, without any of the inconvenience.’
But I like the inconveniences.’
We don’t,’ said the Controller. ‘We prefer to do things comfortably.’
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.’
In fact,’ said Mustapha Mond, ‘you’re 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.
Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. ‘You’re welcome,’ he said.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Characters: The Savage and Mustapha Mond, Chapter 17, Page 163
“I ate civilization…It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then,” he added in a lower tone, “I ate my own wickedness.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: The Savage, Chapter 18, Page 164
“Pain was a fascinating horror”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: The Narrator, Chapter 18, Page 176
“Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned towards the right; north, north-east, east, south-east, south, south-south-west; then paused, and, after a few seconds, turned as unhurriedly back towards the left. South-south-west, south, south-east, east. . .
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Character: The Narrator about the Savage, Chapter 18, Page 177