Quotes About Dystopia

Anti-utopianism continues to suffuse our culture...Today few imagine that society can be fundamentally improved, and those who do are seen as at best deluded, at worst threatening.

Gathering Blue' was a separate book. I wanted to explore what a society might become after a catastrophic world event. Only at the end did I realize I could make it connect to 'The Giver.

Orgy-porgy, round and round and round, beating one another in six-eight time.

Every generation has a macabre notion that wars, government prohibition, natural disasters or mankind itself could be the downfall of society and the world as a whole.

what a horrible loutish planet this is. the dominant species consists of sadistic morons, faces bearing the hideous lineaments of spiritual famine swollen with stupid hate. hopeless rubbish.

There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it.

Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm awfully 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 color. I'm so glad I'm a Beta.

But, Bernard, you're saying the most awful things.' 'Don't you wish you were free, Lenina?' 'I don't know what you mean. I am free. Free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody's happy nowadays.' He laughed, 'Yes, Everybody's happy nowadays. We begin giving children that at five. But wouldn't you like to be free to e happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else's way.

there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon...

What fun it would be if one didn't have to think about happiness! - From Brave New World

And do remember that a gramme is better than a damn.

Each one of us, of course, the Controller meditatively continued, goes through life inside a bottle. But if we happen to be Alphas, our bottles are, relatively speaking enormous.

Punctured, utterly deflated, he dropped into a chair and, covering his face with his hands, began to weep. A few minutes later, however, he thought better of it and took four tablets of soma. Upstairs in his room the Savage was reading Romeo and Juliet.

Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't. Whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth or beauty that mattered. Happiness has got to be paid for. It hasn't been very good for truth of course. But it's been very good for happiness.

What you need is a gramme of soma." "All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.

Christianity without tears—that's what soma is.

Fortunate boys!' said the Controller. 'No pains have been spared to make your lives emotionally easy - to preserve you, so as far as that is possible, from having emotions at all.' 'Ford's in his flivver,' murmured the DHC. 'All's well with the world.

And if you were an Epsilon,' said Henry, 'your conditioning would have made you no less thankful that you weren't a Beta or an Alpha.

she wasn't a real savage, had been hatched out of a bottle and conditioned like any one else:

In the Brave New World of my prophetic fable technology had advanced far beyond the point it had reached in Hitler's day; consequently the recipients of orders were far less critical than their Nazi counterparts, far more obedient to the order-giving elite.

Imagine a factory staffed by Alphas—that is to say by separate and unrelated individuals of good heredity and conditioned so as to be capable (within limits) of making a free choice and assuming responsibilities. Imagine it!

Brave new world

Near Shepherd's Bush two thousand Beta-Minus mixed doubles were playing Riemann-surface tennis.

Orgy-porgy, round and round and round, beating one another in six-eight time.