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4. A gramme is always better than a damn . . . A gramme in time saves nine . . . One cubic centimetre cures ten gloomy sentiments . . . Everybody’s happy nowadays . . . Every one works for every one else . . . When the individual feels, the community reels . . . Never put off till to-morrow the fun you can have to-day . . . Progress is lovely Explanation for Quotation 4 >> These are samples of hypnopaedic sayings that are scattered throughout the novel. Lenina is a continual source of them. In Chapter 6, she responds to Bernard’s soliloquy about the need to be alone with almost nothing but hypnopaedic phrases. Bernard tells her how many times, and for how long, each phrase is pumped into the ears of sleeping children. The irony is that Bernard himself is one of the people responsible for the hypnopaedic phrases, but when he tries to escape their logic he is trapped by the people around him who take every hypnopaedic saying as undeniable truth. The quotes sampled here reflect some of the basic principles of World State society: the use of soma to deal with unpleasant emotions; the identification of happiness as the ultimate goal; the maintenance of the caste system and the use of conditioning to create workers who enjoy their work; the prioritizing of the community over the individual; the support of instant gratification; the promotion of technology and science as necessary foundations of the good life 1. Mother, monogamy, romance. High spurts the fountain; fierce and foamy the wild jet. The urge has but a single outlet. My love, my baby. No wonder those poor pre-moderns were mad and wicked and miserable. Their world didn’t allow them to take things easily, didn’t allow them to be sane, virtuous, happy. What with mothers and lovers, what with the prohibitions they were not conditioned to obey, what with the temptations and the lonely remorses, what with all the diseases and the endless isolating pain, what with the uncertainties and the poverty—they were forced to feel strongly. And feeling strongly (and strongly, what was more, in solitude, in hopelessly individual isolation), how could they be stable? Explanation for Quotation 1 >> This passage comes from Chapter 3, when Mustapha Mond is explaining the history of the World State to the group of boys touring the Hatchery. “Mother, monogamy, romance”can be seen as a concise summary of exactly the issues with which John will be most concerned. And “feeling strongly” is what John values most highly, and also what leads to his eventual self-flagellation, insanity, and suicide. Mustapha is saying that by doing away with these things, the World State has finally brought stability and peace to humanity. John’s critique of this position is that stability and peace are not worth throwing away everything that is worthwhile about life—“mother, monogamy, romance” included. Another facet of World State philosophy that is encapsulated in this quote is the idea of constructing a world in which human beings have only one way of behaving. The World State is an enormous system of production and consumption in which humans are turned into machines for further production and consumption. The world “allows” them to be happy by creating a system in which not being happy—by choosing truth over soma—is forbidden.