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Quote by Aldous Huxley

Work

Brave New World

Written by Aldous Huxley, this seminal work delves into themes of societal control, consumerism, and the loss of individuality through a vivid portrayal of a world where people are conditioned from birth to conform to their predetermined roles. more

Author

Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley was an English writer and philosopher, renowned for his dystopian novel 'Brave New World'. Born on July 26, 1894, in Godalming, Surrey, England, he was the younger brother of the poet and critic Leonard Huxley. Huxley's works frequently delved into the interplay of science, politics, and philosophy, and he was a prominent figure in the literary movement known as the 'Lost Generation'. He passed away on November 22, 1963. more

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“The American City was not unlike the first great products of American industrialism itself: the Colt revolver and the Winchester rifle. Gun manufacturing taught American industry about mass production, standardization, and the virtues of interchangeable parts, and the American city that industrialism produced was itself a very big gun: standardized, hugely profitable, and morally indifferent about any victims.”

“...all this abstraction is also potentially distancing. We don't see the labor that went into building our railroads or the civilizations that were wiped out in order to clear the land. We don't see the millennia of dinosaurs or plankton that went into our oil, the Chinese repetitive stress injuries that went into our iPhones, or any of the other time-intensive processes we can spend in an instant today. We tend to see math and science as a steady state of facts rather than as the accumulated knowledge of linear traditions. As Korzybski put it, we see further because we "stand on the shoulders" of the previous generation.”

“...most of the parade's attendees clung to a notion of what their town was, what values it embodied, what hopes it carved out, though by 2007 its once-largest employers, a steel tube plant and two plate glass manufacturers, were over twenty years gone and most of the county's small farms had been gobbled up by Smithfield, Syngenta, Tyson, and Archer Daniels Midland. Many of those residents who had not been born in this country but who'd made their way from Kuala Lumpur or Jordan or Delhi or Honduras waved those flags the hardest when the casket went by.”

“So, if capitalism is not really the root of the problem socialist societies share with late capitalist societies, there must be some­thing else, something shared in common. And that, it would seem to me, is industrialism. That, and the peculiar social forms gener­ated by the industrial process itself. Centralization is a dynamic shared, of necessity, by any industrial/industrializing society. Rationalization is another factor...assembly­ line workers are alienated [not] so much by the abstract notion of their "distancing" from their "product" or "profit" so much as they are alienated by the sheer physical misery of being trapped in a factory.”