# Quote — Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

> Unless we choose to decentralize and to use applied science, not as the end to which human beings are to be made the means, but as the means to producing a race of free individuals, we have only two alternatives to choose from: either a number of national, militarized totalitarianisms, having as their root the terror of the atomic bomb and as their consequence the destruction of civilization (or, if the warfare is limited, the perpetuation of militarism); or else one supra-national totalitarianism, called into existence by the social chaos resulting from rapid technological progress in general and the atomic revolution in particular, and developing, under the need for efficiency and stability, into the welfare-tyranny of Utopia. You pays your money and you takes your choice.

- Author: [Aldous Huxley](https://www.leafyquotes.com/aldous-huxley.md)
- Book: [Brave New World](https://www.leafyquotes.com/aldous-huxley/brave-new-world.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Brave_New_World#Foreword_to_1946_edition) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/aldous-huxley/brave-new-world/unless-we-choose

## More from this book

> "So you don't much like civilization, Mr. Savage,"

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/aldous-huxley/brave-new-world/so-you-dont.md)

> Well, duty's duty. One can't consult one's own preference. I'm interested in truth, I like science. But truth's a menace, science is a public danger. As dangerous as it's been beneficent. It has given us the stablest equilibrium in history. China's was hopelessly insecure by comparison; even the primitive matriarchies weren't steadier than we are. Thanks, I repeat, to science. But we can't allow science to undo its own good work. That's why we so carefully limit the scope of its researches–that's why I almost got sent to an island. We don't allow it to deal with any but the most immediate problems of the moment. All other enquiries are most sedulously discouraged.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/aldous-huxley/brave-new-world/well-dutys-duty.md)

> "One would think he was going to have his throat cut," said the Controller, as the door closed. "Whereas, if he had the smallest sense, he'd understand that his punishment is really a reward. He's being sent to an island. That's to say, he's being sent to a place where he'll meet the most interesting set of men and women to be found anywhere in the world. All the people who, for one reason or another, have got too self-consciously individual to fit into community-life. All the people who aren't satisfied with orthodoxy, who've got independent ideas of their own. Every one, in a word, who's any one. I almost envy you, Mr. Watson."

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/aldous-huxley/brave-new-world/one-would-think.md)