Quotes from Brave New World

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World

“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, quote from Brave New World

“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.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World

“If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World

“I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World

“I am I, and I wish I weren't.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World

“One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World

“I like being myself. Myself and nasty.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World

“Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World

“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, quote from Brave New World

“...most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World

“Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World

“No social stability without individual stability.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World

“I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then," he added in a lower tone, "I ate my own wickedness.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World

“I'd rather be myself," he said. "Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World

“...reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays....”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World

“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, quote from Brave New World

“There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol."
...
"There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality."
...
"But they used to take morphia and cocaine."
...
"Two thousand pharmacologists and biochemists were subsidized in A.F. 178."
...
"Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug."
...
"Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant."
...
"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, quote from Brave New World

“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, quote from Brave New World

“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.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World

“There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World

“Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World

“I want God, I want poetry, I want danger, I want freedom, I want sin.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World

“A love of nature keeps no factories busy.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World

“It is natural to believe in God when you're alone-- quite alone, in the night, thinking about death.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World

“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, quote from Brave New World

“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, quote from Brave New World

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Popular quotes

“I have the honour to be quite of your Lordship's opinion," said Mr. Lovel, looking maliciously at Mrs. Selwyn, "for I have an insuperable aversion to strength, either of body or mind, in a female."

"Faith, and so have I," said Mr. Coverley; "for egad I'd as soon see a woman chop wood, as hear her chop logic."

"So would every man in his senses," said Lord Merton; "for a woman wants nothing to recommend her but beauty and good nature; in every thing else she is either impertinent or unnatural. For my part, deuce take me if ever I wish to hear a word of sense from a woman as long as I live!"

"It has always been agreed," said Mrs. Selwyn, looking round her with the utmost contempt, "that no man ought to be connected with a woman whose understanding is superior to his own. Now I very much fear, that to accommodate all this good company, according to such a rule, would be utterly impracticable, unless we should chuse subjects from Swift's hospital of idiots.”
― Fanny Burney, quote from Evelina

“I saw Trout Fishing in America Shorty passed out in the front window of a Filipino laundromat. He was sitting in his wheelchair with closed eyes staring out the window.

There was a tranquil expression on his face. He almost looked human. He had probably fallen asleep while he was having his brains washed in one of the machines.

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“But he could not go up to the room as yet, and seating himself on a stone step, his head on his arms, he wept silently. Years had passed since he had shed tears, or so it seemed. Surely years since he had let them flow so copiously. And what stopped him finally was that he could hear his own crying.”
― Anne Rice, quote from Cry to Heaven

“The nymphs in green? Delightful girls.’ ‘It is clear you have been a great while at sea, to call those sandy-haired coarse-featured pimply short-necked thick-fingered vulgar-minded lubricious blockheads by such a name. Nymphs, forsooth. If they were nymphs, they must have had their being in a tolerably rank and stagnant pool: the wench on my left had an ill breath, and turning for relief I found her sister had a worse; and the upper garment of neither was free from reproach. Worse lay below, I make no doubt.”
― Patrick O'Brian, quote from H.M.S. Surprise

“What was it - this implacable remoteness, this inability to surrender herself to the warmth and comradely feelings of others? Could being an academic star, being applauded over and over again as a prodigy, take the place of all that? She shuddered with a feeling she couldn't have put a name to. It was the congenital human fear of isolation.”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from I am Charlotte Simmons

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