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Quotes and References on Brave New World
Quotes from Brave New World
On dresscodes:
“Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they’re so frightfully clever. I’m really awfuly glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. [... ] Oh no, I don’t want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They’re too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I’m so glad I’m a Beta.” ( BNW 22-3)
On history:
“ ‘You all remember,’ said the Controller, in his strong deep voice, ‘you all remember, I suppose, that beautiful and inspired saying of Our Ford’s: History is bunk. History,’ he repeated slowly, ‘is bunk.’ ” ( BNW
After the Nine-Years War, there was a “campaign against the past, closing of museums, blowing up of monuments” ( BNW 43)
Lenina shook her head. ‘Was and will make me ill,’ she quoted, ‘I take a gramme and only am.’ ( BNW 90)
On soma:
“ ‘no time, no leisure from pleasure, not a moment to sit down and think – or if ever by some unlucky chance such a crevice of time should yawn in the solid substance of their distractions, there is always soma’ ” ( BNW 47)
“there she [Linda] 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 what beautifully inevitable windings) to a bright centre of absolute conviction; where the dancing images of the television box were the performers in some indescribably delicious all-singing feely; where the dripping patchouli was more than scent–was the sun, was a million saxophones, was Popé making love, only much more so, incomparably more, and without end.” ( BNW 135; on the effect of soma)
On difference and isolation:
“Yes, a little too able; they were right. A mental excess had produced in Helmholtz Watson effects very similar to those which, in Bernard Marx, were the result of a physical defect [8cm too short]. Too little bone and brawn had isolated Bernard from his fellow men, and the sense of this apartness, being, by all the current standards, a mental excess, became in its turn a cause of wider separation. That which had made Helmholtz so uncomfortably aware of being himself and all alone was too much ability. What the two men shared was the knowledge that they were individuals. But whereas the physically defective Bernard had suffered all his life from the consciousness of being separate, it was only quite recently that, grown aware of his mental excess, Helmholtz Watson had also become aware of his difference from the people who surrounded him.” ( BNW 57-8)
“ ‘Alone, always alone,’ the young man was saying. The words awoke a plaintive echo in Bernard’s mind. Alone, alone... ‘So am I,’ he said, on a gush of confidingness. ‘Terribly alone.’ [... ] ‘Yes, that’s just it.’ The young man nodded. ‘If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely. They’re beastly to one.’ ” ( BNW
“Success went fizzily to Bernard’s head, and in the process completely reconciled him (as any good intoxicant should do) to a world which, up till then, he had found very unsatisfactory. In so far as it recognized him as important, the order of things was good.” ( BNW 136)
On Shakespeare:
“But, taken detail by verbal detail, what a superb piece of emotional engineering! ‘That old fellow,’ he said, ‘he makes our best propaganda technicians look absolutely silly.’ ” ( BNW 160; Helmholtz on Shakespeare)
Historical Context
Frederick Taylor
“[O]ne of the first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type. The man who is mentally alert and intelligent is for this very reason entirely unsuited to what would, for him, be the grinding monotony of work of this character. [... T]he workman who is best suited to handling pig iron is unable to understand the real science of doing this class of work. He is so stupid that the word ‘percentage’ has no meaning to him, and he must consequently be trained by a man more intelligent than himself into the habit of working in accordance with the laws of this science before he can be successful.” (Taylor 59)
(Sidenote: Taylor was generally popular with (upper) management and ill-received by workers, and especially by unions. The actual effectiveness (and especially sustainability) of his methods were questioned in, among others, a study conducted in 1974.)
Behaviorism & John B. Watson
“[P]ick up a steel bar and strike it loudly behind the infant’s head. Immediately the fear response is called for. Now try this: At the instant you show him the animal and just as he begins to reach for it strike the steel bar behind his head. Repeat the experiments three or four times and you have a new and important change. The animal now calls out the same response in the baby as the steel bar, namely, a fear response.” ( New York Times Jan 4, 1925)
“The ambition of behaviorism is to reach such a proficiency in our science that we can build any man, starting at birth, into any kind of a social being upon order. We hope to make it possible to build human beings according to specifications. [... ] we can take the worst adult failure (provided he is biologically sound), pull him apard—psychologically speaking—and give him a new set of works. [... ] We understand the process [of nurture, stimuli] and we can, to some extent, control it. And when we do control it perfectly, we shall be able to do anything with human nature. We shall actually begin to manufacture human nature to specifications.” (John B. Watson in Boston Daily Globe Apr 10, 1927)
“Rotation of children in groups from mother to mother or from nurse to nurse, without any mother or
would be waste. But if he and his machine occupy more space than is required, that also is waste. This brings our machines closer together than in probably any other factory in the world. To a stranger they may seem piled right on top of one another, but they are scientifically arranged, not only in the sequence of operations, but to give every man and every machine every square inch that he requires and, if possible, not a square inch, and certainly not a square foot, more than he requires.” ( My Life and Work 113)
“The large wage had other results. In 1914, when the first plan went into effect, we had 14,000 employees and it had been necessary to hire at the rate of about 53,000 a year in order to keep a constant force of 14,000. In 1915 we had to hire only 6,508 men and the majority of these new men were taken on because of the growth of the business.” ( My Life and Work 129)
On prohibition:
“Henry Ford would cease manufacturing if prohibition should be repealed [... ]. ‘I would not be bothered with the problem of handling over 200,000 men and trying to pay them wages which the saloons would take away from them,’ Mr Ford writes. ‘I wouldn’t be interested in putting automobiles in the hands of a generation soggy with drink. With booze in control we can count on only two or three effective days’ work in the factory. That would destroy the short day and the five-day week.”’ ( New York Times Aug 22, 1929)
On history:
“ ‘Say, what do I care about Napoleon?’ he rambled on. ‘What do we care what they did 500 or 1,000 years ago? I don’t know whether Napoleon did or did not try to get across there [Calais/Dover] and I don’t care. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s dam is the history we make today. That’s the trouble with the world. We’re living in books and history and tradition. We want to get away from that and take care of today. We’ve done too much looking back. What we want to do and do it quick is to make just history right now.’ ” ( Chicago Daily Tribune May 25, 1916; interview by Charles Wheeler)
“ ‘History is bunk. What difference does it make how many times the ancient Greeks flew their kites? America is the greatest land and has the greatest people in the world. We are the pioneer stock of the world, those who dared. We all came from the old country, in some sense. [... ] We can’t help but win. We won the war not on a fluke, but because it was right to win.’ ” ( New York Times Oct 29, 1921)
Bibliography and Further Reading
Baudrillard, Jean. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. 1970. SAGE, 1998.
Ford, Henry, and Samuel Crowther. My Life and Work. Doubleday, Page & Co., 1922.
‘Ford Praises Prohibition’. New York Times , 22 Aug. 1929.
Grandin, Greg. Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City. Picador, 2009.
‘History Is Bunk, Says Henry Ford’. New York Times , 29 Oct. 1921.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. 1932. Vintage Books, 2004.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1991.
Kalonyme, Louis. ‘Man at Birth Has No Fear, Tests Reveal’. New York Times , 4 Jan. 1925.
Taylor, Frederick W. The Principles of Scientific Management. Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1911.
‘Urges Rotary Plan to Train Children’. New York Times , 4 Mar. 1928.
Watson, John B. ‘Humans Made to Specifications’. Boston Daily Globe , 10 Apr. 1927.
Wheeler, Charles N. ‘Close-Up View of Henry Ford and His Ideas’. Chicago Daily Tribune , 23 May 1916.
