O brave new world that has such people in it...

I read Brave New World this morning with a pencil and a huge cup of coffee. This are some little bits of fantastic Huxley writing and ponderings.

Chapter 1
"For particulars, as everyone knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectoers compose the backbone of society."

"That is the secret of happiness and virtue: liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like thier unescapable social destiny."

Chapter 4
"Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly, they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced."

Chapter 6
"Progress is lovely, isn't it?"

Chapter 8
"Lying in bed, he would think of Heaven and London and Our Lady of Acoma and the rows and rows of babies and Jesusflying up and Linda flying up and the great Director and World hatcheries and Awonawilona."

"A man can smile and smile and be a villain."

"He had never really hated Pope before; never really hated him because he had never been able to say how much he hated him. But now he had these words, these words like drums and singing and magic. These words and the strange, strange story out of which they were taken (he couldn't make head or tail of it, but it was wonderful, wonderful all the same)--they gave him a reason for hating Pope; and they made his hatred more real; they even made Pope himself more real."

"He had discovered Time and Death and God."

"If one's different, one's bound to be lonely."

Chapter 9
"Zip, and the zip; zip, and then zip; he was enchanted."

Chapter 10
"The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray."

"Murder kills only the induvidual, and after all, what is an induvidual."

Chapter 11
"...there she remained; and yet wasn't there at all, was all the time away, infinitely far away, on holiday; on holiday in some other world, where the music of the radio was a labyrinth of sonorous colours, a sliding, palpitating labyrinth, that led (by whatr beautifully inevitable windings) to a bright centre of absolute conviction."

"Bernard would parade a carping unorthodoxy."

Chapter 12
"'What fun would it be,' he thought, 'if one didn't have to think about happiness!'"

Chapter 13
"An emblem of the inner tide of startled elation, the blood rushed up into Lenina's cheeks."

Chapter 16
"Only in Othello's words could he find an adequate vehicle for his contempt and hatred."

"Our world is not the same as Othello's world. You can't make flivvers without steel, and you can't make tragedies without social instability."

"Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparision with the overcompensations for misery."

"Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy."

"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...Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't."

Chapter 17
"But God dosn't change."
"Men do, though."
"What difference does that make?"
"All the difference in the world."

"We are not our own masters. We are God's property. It is not our happiness thus to view the matter? Is it any happiness or any comfort, to consider that we are our own?" [To be fair, this is acctually the philosopher Maine de Biran's words.]

"Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons--that's philosophy."

"Providence takes it's cue from men."

"Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your mortality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears--that's what soma is." [Soma is a anti-depressant/instant holiday pill given to all castes.]

"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."

Chapter 18
"'I say,' Helmholtz exclaimed solicitously, 'you do look ill, John.'"
"'Did you eat soemthing that didn't agree with you?' asked Bernard."
"The Savage nodded. 'I ate civilization.'"
"What?"
"'It poisioned me; I was defiled. And then,' he added, in a lower tone, 'I ate my own wickedness.'"

Basically, read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. It's brilliant.