60 Brave New World Quotes From the Dystopian Novel (2021)

These Brave New World quotes will change the way you see the world.

Brave New World is a dystopian novel by English author Aldous Huxley, a story that ultimately birthed the science-fiction genre. The story has many controversial themes that challenged ideas at the time it was written. And today, more than 75 years later, the book poses a lot of food for thought that may seem more relevant than it was in the 1930s. 

Brave New World talks about the impact scientific advancement can have on society, and what the outcomes can be. Because of some of the attitudes the book has on religion and race, it has been banned in many institutions around the world.

Whether you’re familiar with the book or you’re now intrigued to read it and see what it’s about for yourself, these Brave New World Quotes will make you question why we’re here and how humans can be so easily manipulated. 

Don’t forget to also read these timeless Fahrenheit 451 quotes that will inspire you to think differently.

Brave New World Quotes on Wisdom

1. “Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

2. “Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

3. “Isn’t there something in living dangerously?” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

4. “There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

5. “A love of nature keeps no factories busy.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

6. “Ending is better than mending.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

7. “We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

8. “Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

9. “This concern with the basic condition of freedom — the absence of physical constraint — is unquestionably necessary, but is not all that is necessary. It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison and yet not free — to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national State, or of some private interest within the nation, want him to think, feel and act.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
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10. “Can you say something about nothing?” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

11. “What would it be like if I were free—not enslaved by my conditioning.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World 

Brave New World Quotes on the Human Condition

12. “I am I, and I wish I weren’t.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

13. “Our world is not the same as Othello’s world. You can’t make flivvers without steel—and 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.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
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14. “Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

15. “When people are suspicious with you, you start being suspicious with them.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

16. “Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

17. “One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

18. “A man can smile and smile and be a villain.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

19. “But every one belongs to every one else” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

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Brave New World Quotes on Believing

20. “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.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

21. “One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

22. “God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make a choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

23. “They’re old; they’re about God hundreds of years ago. Not about God now. But God doesn’t change. Men do though” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

24. “Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.”  ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Brave New World Quotes on Loneliness

25. “If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

26. “It is natural to believe in God when you’re alone– quite alone, in the night, thinking about death.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

27. “A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Also read these memorable Dante’s Inferno quotes highlighting central themes.

Brave New World Quotes on Emotions

28. “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.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

29. “I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

30. “Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

31. “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

32. “I’d rather be myself,” he said. “Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

33. “You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We’ve sacrificed the high art.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

34. “Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning, truth and beauty can’t.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

35. “Happiness has got to be paid for. You’re paying for it, Mr. Watson–paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty. I was too much interested in truth; I paid too.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

36. “Did you ever feel, as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out? Some sort of extra power that you aren’t using – you know, like all the water that goes down the falls instead of through the turbines?” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

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Brave New World Quotes on Society

37. “…most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

38. “Did you eat something that didn’t agree with you?” asked Bernard. The Savage nodded. “I ate civilization.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

39. “No social stability without individual stability.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

40. “I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then,” he added in a lower tone, “I ate my own wickedness.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

41. “…reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays….” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

42. “A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

43. “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.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

44. “We don’t want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

45. “It isn’t only art that is incompatible with happiness, it’s also science. Science is dangerous, we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

46. “Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

47. “What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

48. “The optimum population is modeled on the iceberg- eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

49. “Round pegs in square holes tend to have dangerous thoughts about the social system and tend to infect others with their discontents.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

50. “Whether ’tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows or outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them…But you don’t do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It’s too easy.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

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Short Brave New World quotes

51. “Pain was a fascinating horror” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

52. “A gramme is better than a damn.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

53. “Yes, and civilization is sterilization.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

54. “The more stitches the less riches…” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

55. “I like being myself. Myself and nasty.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

56. “I claim them all,” said the Savage at last.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

57. “But isn’t it natural to feel there’s a God?” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

58. “What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

59. “He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

60. “There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality. But they used to take morphia and cocaine.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

What did you learn from these Brave New World quotes?

Brave New World is one of the most influential sci-fi novels of its time, and perhaps one of the most thought-provoking stories ever written. While the book touches on many interesting themes, the overall concept of how powerful technology and science can be in our lives and in society, is something that we should all think about, especially in this day and age.

If you haven’t read Brave New World, it’s certainly worth a read, as it can open your mind up to thoughts and theories about humans that you may not have otherwise pondered. But in the meantime, these Brave New World quotes will give you some conversation points to bring to your next dinner party.

What’s your biggest takeaway from these Brave New World quotes and lines? Do you have any other favorite quotes to add? Let us know in the comment section below.