Quotes for Friday from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

'We condition them to thrive on heat,' concluded Mr Foster. 'Our colleagues upstairs will teach them to love it..'

'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'. [12]

'I am I, and I wish I wasn't' [55]

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. [59]

Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly - they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced. [60]

When people are suspicious with you, you start being suspicious with them. [60]

The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray. It is better than one should suffer than that many should be corrupted. [128]

'...Murder kills only the individual - and, after all, what is an individual?' With a sweeping gesture he indicated the rows of microscopes, the test-tubes, the incubators. 'We can make a new one with the greatest ease - as many as we like. Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself...' [128]

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. [156]

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 in 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 acknowledgement, continual prayer, continual reference of what they do to 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 ... [205]

You remind me of another of those 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. [207]