One Believes Things Because One Has

This line appears in Brave New World (1932), spoken in the context of the World State's totalitarian social engineering. Huxley was deeply influenced by the work of Ivan Pavlov and the emerging field of behaviourism, and the novel explores how conditioning — through hypnopaedia and soma — can make citizens complicit in their own subjugation. It remains one of Huxley's starkest statements about the fragility of independent thought.