Words expressing desire may be more moving than the presence of the desired person.
But there’s another one who doesn’t get frightened.” “Which one is that?” “The one that doesn’t talk – just looks and listens and feels what’s going on inside.
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.
The world’s stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get.
Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestion is the child’s mind. And no the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too – all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides – made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions! Suggestions from the State.
Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they ahd been made for man, not as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them.
As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope and movies and the radio, it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.
You couldn’t have lower-caste people wasting the Community’s time over books, and that there was always the risk of their reading something which might undesirably decondition one of their reflexes.
In spite of his misery he absolutely refused to take the half gramme raspberry sundae which she pressed upon him, I’d rather be myself he said. Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.
Why you don’t take soma when you have these dreadful ideas of yours. You’d forget all about them. And instead of feeling miserable, you’d be jolly.
Here nobody’s supposed to belong to more than one person. And if you have people in the ordinary way, the others think you’re wicked and anti-social.
The soma tablets within reach of her hand – there she remained, and yet wasn’t there at all, was all the time away, infinitely far away, on holiday.
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.
But value dwells no in particular will, said the Savage. It holds his estimate and dignity as well wherein ’tis precious of itself as in the prizer.
There’s always soma to give you a holiday form 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.
Alas, higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue, or higher political wisdom.
God’s best joke, so far as he himself was concerned, was not being there. Simply not there. Neither God nor the devil. For if the devil had been there, God would have been there too. All that was there was the memory of a sordid disgusting stupidity and now an enormous knockabout. First an affair of dust-bins and then a farce. But that was what the devil really was: the spirit of dust-bins. And God? God in that case would be simply the absence of dust-bins.
It’s good to be cynical,” he said. “That is, if you know when to stop. Most of the things that we’re all taught to respect and reverence- they don’t deserve anything but cynicism.
To most people radical change is even more odious than cynicism. The only way between the horns of the dilemma is to persist at all costs in the ignorance which permits one to go on doing wrong in the comforting belief that by doing so one is doing one’s duty- one’s duty to the company, to the shareholders, to the family, the city, the state, the fatherland, the Church.
I looked down by chance, and went on passionately staring by choice, at my own crossed legs,” the writer and philosopher recollected. “Those folds in the trousers – what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the texture of the gray flannel – how rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous.