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.
O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't!
When the individual feels, the community reels.
All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny.
"All right then," said the savage defiantly, I'm claiming the right to be unhappy." "Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." There was a long silence. "I claim them all," said the Savage at last.
All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.
We can't allow science to undo its own good work.
But every one belongs to every one else
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.
No social stability without individual stability.
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.
God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.
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.
Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery.
"But 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.
All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.
The more stitches, the less riches.
What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder.
Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations 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.
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
or simply:
