Quotes about Society

Mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters. But there were also husbands, wives, lovers. There were also monogamy and romance. "Though you probably don't know what those are," said Mustapha Mond. They shook their heads. Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness, a narrow channelling of impulse and energy. "But every one belongs to every one else," he concluded, citing the hypnopædic proverb.

Punctured, utterly deflated, he dropped into a chair and, covering his face with his hands, began to weep. A few minutes later, however, he thought better of it and took four tablets of soma. Upstairs in his room the Savage was reading Romeo and Juliet.

By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.

Believe it or not, a normal human being is one who can have an orgasm and is adjusted to his society.

Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't. Whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth or beauty that mattered. Happiness has got to be paid for. It hasn't been very good for truth of course. But it's been very good for happiness.

I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defined. And then, I ate my own wickedness.

So long as it remains out of touch with the rest of the world, an ideal society can be a viable society.

Thanks to technological progress, Big Brother can now be almost as omnipresent as God.

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 . . .

Twenty-two years eight months and four days from that moment, a promising young Alpha- Minus administrator at Mwanza-Mwanza was to die of trypanosomiasis - the first case for over half a century. Sighing, Lenina went on with her work.

Community, Identity, Stability." Grand words. "If we could bokanovskify indefinitely the whole problem would be solved.

But all the same," insisted the Savage, "it is natural to believe in God when you're alone—quite alone, in the night, thinking about death …" "But people never are alone now," said Mustapha Mond. "We make them hate solitude; and we arrange their lives so that it's almost impossible for them ever to have it.