H. G. Wells (Herbert George) (1866 – 1946)
British writer best known for his science fiction novels such as The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, and The Time Machine; also for Kipps, The History of Mr Polly and other social satires.
I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes—to come to this at last. Once, life and property must have reached almost absolute safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed.
It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo. It is the peculiar snare of the perplexed orthodox, and soon Mr. Brumley was in a state of nearly unendurable moral indignation with Sir Isaac for a hundred exaggerations of what he was and of what conceivably he might have done to his silent yet manifestly unsuitably married wife.
"It's this accursed science," I cried. "It's the very Devil. The medieval priests and persecutors were right and the Moderns are all wrong. You tamper with it—and it offers you gifts. And directly you take them it knocks you to pieces in some unexpected way. Old passions and new weapons—now it upsets your religion, now it upsets your social ideas, now it whirls you off to desolation and misery!"
There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection.
In 1933, Einstein's works were among those burned in the book bonfires organized by the Nazis throughout Germany, together with those of such different anti-fascist writers as Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Freud, Proust, Hemingway, H. G. Wells, Gide, Upton Sinclair, etc.
When the history of our civilization is written, it will be a biological history and Margaret Sanger will be its heroine.
John Cabal: If we don’t end war, war will end us.
He was inordinately proud of England, and he abused her incessantly.
Oswald Cabal: Dragging out life to the last possible second is not living to the best effect. The nearer the bone, the sweeter the meat. The best of life, Passworthy, lies nearest to the edge of death.
Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness.
But man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of Nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him.
He, I know—for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made—thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilisation only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so.
For crude classifications and false generalisations are the curse of all organised human life.
He had developed in the most wonderful way the distinctive silliness of man without losing one jot of the natural folly of a monkey.
If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.