Aldous Huxley Brave New World Quotations

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.

If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time.

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.

Hug me till you drug me, honey; Kiss me till I'm in a coma.

All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.

But every one belongs to every one else

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 particulars, as everyone knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.

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.

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.

The more stitches, the less riches.

When the individual feels, the community reels.

God in the safe and Ford on the shelves.

The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray.

You all remember, I suppose, that beautiful and inspired saying of Our Ford's: History is bunk.

Sixty two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. Idiots!

‎"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.

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.

...reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays....

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.

Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning, truth and beauty can't.

Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.

On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

The optimum population is modeled on the iceberg- eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery.

What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder.

All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny.

No social stability without individual stability.

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?

What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?

A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.

What I may call the messages of Brave New World, but it is possible to make people contented with their servitude. I think this can be done. I think it has been done in the past. I think it could be done even more effectively now because you can provide them with bread and circuses and you can provide them with endless amounts of distractions and propaganda.

The greatest triumphs of propoganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.