BRAVE NEW WORLD CONDITIONING QUOTES

“Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today.”

“Do you know that even in our pre-destinationing society a man sometimes doesn’t know what he’s doing till he gets his orders?”

“Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too; all his life long.”

“Television and all it implies has pursued me across half a century… it’s the television drug that’s the crucial importance. That’s what I mean when I say this book is about the effect of the television drug on a society.”

“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.”

“But a reasonably small number of the right sort of predestined will be needed for the administrative and other intellectual elite.”

“I really do think, considering the circumstances, he’s been extremely lucky.”

“I’d like to buy some. Are they good ones?”

“Gonads, ovaries, testes,” whispered the Director, and, letting his voice sink to a soft murmur, intimate, as though the trees that fringed the roof were not more distant than the neighbouring planets, murmured, “And now I am going to tell you,” he said, “exactly why it was that we introduced this stability into your hatchery.”

“Talking about her as though she were a bit of meat.”

“Robinson Crusoe, for example, seems to me an appalling book—a nasty little fella, that’s what I make him. I can’t understand how literature has lasted for so long. It must be embarrassing for you, being an Alpha.”

“Nothing costs enough here.”

“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.”

“He wanted to be the first to see octuplets!”

“When the individual feels, the community reels.” LETTING GO OF THE PAST QUOTES

“Oh no, 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.”

“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.”

“It was started by a man called Reuben Rabinovitch, an advertising expert, who dreamed one night, after a lot of bad margarine, that there was a society called Utopia where everyone could live forevermore in a state of carnal bliss. Brek-kuk-kuk-kuk-kek!”

“Six months of play in infant nurseries, six months of sleep in one of the State Conditioning Centres.”

“…Which will it be, old man?” he said. “Can’t have both, you know.” He was right. The choice had to be made.

“A gramme is always better than a damn.”

“The Savage raised a hand to his lips, then let it fall, again to his lips, again and again. The Controller smiled. ‘I apologize. I had forgotten. I am simply assuming that you will be fit for the ordinary purposes of civilized existence.'”

“Don’t you like being treated like an adult?”

“I would if I were one.”

“There’s no mention here, I see, of any centrifugal bumble-puppy.”

“It [life] was a time of madness.”

“And when the individual feels and the community reels, we start the application of moral chemistry, and the super ego becomes a reality. Happily, we have found a drug that does away with the need for courage.”

“Isn’t there something in living dangerously?”