Mustapha Mond

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

"Stability is obviously better than truth."

"That's the price we have to pay for stability."

"They're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to."

"You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art."

"Wheels must turn steadily, but cannot turn untended."

"You can't make flivvers without steel—and you can't make tragedies without social instability."

"We can't allow things like stability."

"The perfect is the enemy of the good."

"God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine."

"Stability. Stability. The primal and the ultimate need."

"You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art."

"The thoughts of reason are the thoughts of a world of individual adults."

"Art, science—you seem to forget they're just hobbies."

"Civilized men and women are punished so far as they are individuals."

"That's the price we have to pay for stability."

"All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny."

"I've gotten old, I'm rather ashamed of it."

"The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get."

"Books, classes, endless lectures, scientific apparatus, experiments."

"Soma has all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects"

"We have the World State now. And drug abuse is death"

"Stability and civilization are in the last analysis incompatible things"

"You can't have a lasting civilization without plenty of pleasant vices"

"The secret of happiness and virtue is liking what you've got to do"

"Science is dangerous"

"Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery"

"We prefer to do things comfortably"

"Civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism"

"The greater the distance from a world that makes sense, the more it will cost in trauma"