Brave New World

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Brave New World (1932) is a dystopian novel by Aldous Huxley. Set in the London of AD 2540 (632 A.F. in the book), the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology and sleep-learning that combine to change society. The future society is an embodiment of the ideals that form the basis of futurism.

Contents 1 Chapter 1 2 Chapter 2 3 Chapter 3 4 Chapter 5 5 Chapter 6 6 Chapter 7 7 Chapter 8 8 Chapter 11 9 Chapter 12 10 Chapter 13 11 Chapter 16 12 Chapter 17 13 External links

[edit] Chapter 1

• Bokanovsky's process is one of the major instruments of social stability!
  • A reference to the importance that the World State attaches to human cloning.

• "Ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical machines!" The voice was almost tremulous with enthusiasm. "You really know where you are. For the first time in history." He quoted the planetary motto. "Community, Identity, Stability." Grand words. "If we could bokanovskify indefinitely the whole problem would be solved."
  • Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning (DHC) for Central London

[edit] Chapter 2

• At the end of the room a loud speaker projected from the wall. The Director walked up to it and pressed a switch.
  "… all wear green," said a soft but very distinct voice, beginning in the middle of a sentence, "and Delta Children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I'm so glad I'm a Beta."
  There was a pause; then the voice began again.
  "Alpha children wear grey They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfuly glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able …"
  The Director pushed back the switch. The voice was silent. Only its thin ghost continued to mutter from beneath the eighty pillows.
  "They'll have that repeated forty or fifty times more before they wake; then again on Thursday, and again on Saturday. A hundred and twenty times three times a week for thirty months. After which they go on to a more advanced lesson."

[edit] Chapter 3

• And home was as squalid psychically as physically. Psychically, it was a rabbit hole, a midden, hot with the frictions of tightly packed life, reeking with emotion. What suffocating intimacies, what dangerous, insane, obscene relationships between the members of the family group! Maniacally, the mother brooded over her children (her children) … brooded over them like a cat over its kittens; but a cat that could talk, a cat that could say, "My baby, my baby," over and over again. "My baby, and oh, oh, at my breast, the little hands, the hunger, and that unspeakable agonizing pleasure! Till at last my baby sleeps, my baby sleeps with a bubble of white milk at the corner of his mouth. My little baby sleeps …"
  "Yes," said Mustapha Mond, nodding his head, "you may well shudder."

• Every one belongs to every one else.
  • Government slogan encouraging sociability and sexual promiscuity.

• 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 these 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?

• "Stability," said the Controller, "stability. No civilization without social stability. No social stability without individual stability."
  • Refers to mass use of soma to create "stable" citizens who conform to societal norms.

• 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. (The embryo is hungry; day in, day out, the blood-surrogate pump unceasingly turns its eight hundred revolutions a minute. The decanted infant howls; at once a nurse appears with a bottle of external secretion. Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation. Shorten that interval, break down all those old unnecessary barriers.

• "Ford's in his flivver," murmured the D.H.C. "All's well with the world."

• "They say somebody made a mistake when he was still in the bottle–thought he was a Gamma and put alcohol into his blood-surrogate. That's why he's so stunted."
  • Rumor as explained by Fanny Crowne as to why Alpha-Plus Bernard Marx looked and acted odd.

• "Sleep teaching was actually prohibited in England. There was something called liberalism. Parliament, if you know what that was, passed a law against it. The records survive. Speeches about liberty of the subject. Liberty to be inefficient and miserable. Freedom to be a round peg in a square hole."
  • Henry Foster

• One hundred repetitions three nights a week for four years, thought Bernard Marx, who was a specialist on hypnopædia. Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. Idiots!
  • Bernard Marx's comments on the preceding slogan and an analysis on the effects of state-sponsored sleep teaching.

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

• I do love new Clothes.
  • A message promoting consumerism.

• (CH₃)C₆H₂(NO₂)₃ + Hg(CNO)₂ = well, what? An enormous hole in the ground, a pile of masonry, some bits of flesh and mucus, a foot, with the boot still on it, flying through the air and landing, flop, in the middle of the geraniums–the scarlet ones; such a splendid show that summer!

• A gramme is better than a damn.
  • Slogan encouraging use of the fictional narcotic soma.

• One cubic centimetre cures ten gloomy sentiments.
  • Slogan encouraging people not to dwell on gloomy thoughts, but to obliterate them with the fictional narcotic, soma.

• Ending is better than mending. The more stitches, the less riches.
  • A government slogan encouraging people to throw away old possessions and buy new ones, thus theoretically keeping the global economy strong.

[edit] Chapter 5

• Every one works for every one else. We can't do without any one. Even Epsilons are useful. We couldn't do without Epsilons. Every one works for every one else. We can't do without any one.

• Bottle of mine, it's you I've always wanted!
  Bottle of mine, why was I ever decanted?
  Skies are blue inside of you
  The weather's always fine;
  For
  There ain't no Bottle in all the world
  Like that dear little Bottle of mine.
  • Lyrics of a popular computer-generated song referring to how babies are artificially gestated.

• Feel how the Greater Being comes!
  Rejoice and, in rejoicing die!
  Melt in the music of the drums!
  For I am you and you are I.
  • Third Solidarity Hymn

• Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun,
  Kiss the girls and make them One.
  Boys at one with girls at peace;
  Orgy-porgy gives release.

[edit] Chapter 6

• A gramme in time saves nine.
  • Slogan encouraging use of soma.

• "Don't you wish you were free, Lenina?"
  "I don't know what you mean. I am free. Free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody's happy nowadays."

• When the individual feels, the community reels.
  • A slogan discouraging individualism in favor of the community as a whole.

• "I'd rather be myself. Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly."
  • Bernard Marx

• "I only said it was lovely here because … well, because progress is lovely, isn't it?"
  • Lenina

• Lenina shook her head. "Was and will make me ill," she quoted, "I take a gramme and only am."

[edit] Chapter 7

• Cleanliness is next to fordliness.
  • The second hypnopædic lesson in elementary hygiene.

• Civilization is sterilization.

• Streptocock-Gee to Banbury-T, to see a fine bathroom and W.C.

[edit] Chapter 8

• "O brave new world," he repeated. "O brave new world that has such people in it. Let's start at once."
  • John quotes Shakespeare's The Tempest when hearing of the technologies and customs of civilization. a more extensive quotation reads "How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't!"

[edit] Chapter 11

• Hug me till you drug me, honey;
  Kiss me till I'm in a coma:
  Hug me, honey, snuggly bunny;
  Love's as good as soma.
  • Fanny Crowne (singing)

[edit] Chapter 12

• 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.

[edit] Chapter 13

• A doctor a day keeps the jim-jams away. (Related to "an apple a day keeps the doctor away")
  • A Hypnopædic message on the necessity of doctoral visits.

• "O thou weed, who are so lovely fair and smell'st so sweet that the sense aches at thee. Was this most goodly book made to write 'whore' upon? Heaven stops the nose at it …"

[edit] Chapter 16

• The Savage shook his head. "It all seems to me quite horrible."
  "Of course it does. Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations 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."

• Happiness is a hard master–particularly other people's happiness. A much harder master, if one isn't conditioned to accept it unquestioningly, than truth.
  • The Controller

• Well, duty's duty. One can't consult one's own preference. I'm interested in truth, I like science. But truth's a menace, science is a public danger. As dangerous as it's been beneficent. It has given us the stablest equilibrium in history. China's was hopelessly insecure by comparison; even the primitive matriarchies weren't steadier than we are. Thanks, I repeat, to science. But we can't allow science to undo its own good work. That's why we so carefully limit the scope of its researches–that's why I almost got sent to an island. We don't allow it to deal with any but the most immediate problems of the moment. All other enquiries are most sedulously discouraged.
  • The Controller

• It's curious," he went on after a little pause, "to read what people in the time of Our Ford used to write about scientific progress. They seemed to have imagined that it could be allowed to go on indefinitely, regardless of everything else. Knowledge was the highest good, truth the supreme value; all the rest was secondary and subordinate. True, ideas were beginning to change even then. Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness. Mass production demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't. And, of course, whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered. Still, in spite of everything, unrestricted scientific research was still permitted. People still went on talking about truth and beauty as though they were the sovereign goods. Right up to the time of the Nine Years' War. That made them change their tune all right. What's the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you? That was when science first began to be controlled–after the Nine Years' War. People were ready to have even their appetites controlled then. Anything for a quiet life. We've gone on controlling ever since. It hasn't been very good for truth, of course. But it's been very good for happiness. One can't have something for nothing. 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."
  • The Controller

[edit] Chapter 17

• "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, reading from Cardinal Newman's book

• "My dear young friend," said Mustapha Mond, "civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. 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. Where 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 any one 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 morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears–that's what soma is."

• "Exposing what is mortal and unsure to all that fortune, death and danger dare, even for an eggshell. Isn't there something in that?" he asked, looking up at Mustapha Mond. "Quite apart from God–though of course God would be a reason for it. 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 inconveniences."
  "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."
  "All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."

[edit] External links

• Online edition of Brave New World
• Brave New World quotes analyzed; themes, quotes, literary devices, multimedia, & teacher guide