Quote 16
"But the tears are necessary. Don't you remember what Othello said? 'If after every tempest came such calms, may the winds blow till they have wakened death.' There's a story one of the old Indians used to tell us, about the Girl of Mátaski. The young men who wanted to marry her had to do a morning's hoeing in her garden. It seemed easy; but there were flies and mosquitoes, magic ones. Most of the young men simply couldn't stand the biting and stinging. But the one that could—he got the girl."
"Charming! But in civilized countries," said the Controller, "you can have girls without hoeing for them, and there aren't any flies or mosquitoes to sting you. We got rid of them all centuries ago." (17.48-9)
John makes another apt point with his quote from Othello: we suffer not only for the sake of suffering, but also for the rewards that come after. Mustapha misses the point in his reply; he says you can have the reward without suffering. But the idea behind John's philosophy is that sweet isn't as sweet without the bitter.
Quote 17
The Savage nodded, frowning. "You got rid of them. Yes, that's just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether 'tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them… But you don't do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It's too easy." (17.50)
John recognizes that he's operating in a very different world than the one in which he was raised. This realization is what ultimately drives him to leave the World State and live in solitude. It is at this moment that he realizes a man like himself cannot function in a world like this—a world without slings or arrows.
Quote 18
"What you need," the Savage went on, "is something with tears for a change. Nothing costs enough here."
("Twelve and a half million dollars," Henry Foster had protested when the Savage told him that. "Twelve and a half million—that's what the new Conditioning Centre cost. Not a cent less.") (17.52-3)
Again there is the problem of failed communication. The closest Henry Foster can come to understanding John's notion of cost (sacrifice) is through a sterile, dehumanized commodity (money).