This post is dealing with the Dystopian novel “Brave New World” by A.Huxley and I’m going to start with some quotations:
“Well I’d rather be unhappy than have the sort of false, lying happiness you were having here”.
“Beauty’s attractive and we don’t want people to be attracted by OLD things. We want them to like the NEW ones”
“You can’t make tragedies without social instability. The world’s stable now. People are happy: they get what they want and they never want what they can’t get. They’re well off; they’re safe; they’re never ill; they’re not afraid of death; they’re blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they’re plagued with no mothers or fathers; they’ve got no wives, or children or loves to feel strongly about; they’re so conditioned that they practically can’t help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong there’s soma”. (…) CHRISTIANITY WITHOUT TEARS – THAT’S WHAT SOMA IS”
“But that’s the price we have to pay for stability. You’ve got to choose between HAPPINESS & what people used to call high ART.(…) 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”
“The tears are necessary. You got rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it”
‘Whether it’s nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them’. Neither suffer or oppose. You abolish the slings and arrows. It’s too easy.
I DON’T WANT COMFORT. I WANT GOD. I WANT POETRY. I WANT REAL DANGER. I WANT FREEDOM. I WANT GOODNESS. I WANT SIN.” (The Savage)