Brave New World Science Quotes

How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Part.Paragraph)

Quote #7

Roses and electric shocks, the khaki of Deltas and a whiff of asafœtida—wedded indissolubly before the child can speak. But wordless conditioning is crude and wholesale; cannot bring home the finer distinctions, cannot inculcate the more complex courses of behaviour. For that there must be words, but words without reason. In brief, hypnopædia. (2.80)

Huxley presents the notion of "hypnopædia" in the most chilling of ways. The reader, of course, instinctively rebels against the thought of being brainwashed, but the Director's casual admittance that the sleep-taught lessons are "irrational" and "without reason" sickens us further.

Quote #8

Outside, in the garden, it was playtime. Naked in the warm June sunshine, six or seven hundred little boys and girls were running with shrill yells over the lawns, or playing ball games, or squatting silently in twos and threes among the flowering shrubs. The roses were in bloom, two nightingales soliloquized in the boskage, a cuckoo was just going out of tune among the lime trees. The air was drowsy with the murmur of bees and helicopters. (3.1)

Science is contrasted with nature here. The children are naked, but they play games with somewhat futuristic contraptions, explained in the next paragraph as Centrifugal Bumble-puppy. The air is filled with bees, but also helicopters.

Quote #9

"Going to the Feelies this evening, Henry?" enquired the Assistant Predestinator. "I hear the new one at the Alhambra is first-rate. There's a love scene on a bearskin rug; they say it's marvellous. Every hair of the bear reproduced. The most amazing tactual effects." (3.42)

Sexual propriety has obviously gone by the wayside—a moral collapse seemingly hastened by technology such as "the feelies."