H. G. Wells Quotes

...there has accumulated a vast tangle of emergency legislation, regulations, barriers and restraints, out of all proportion to and often missing and distorting the needs of the situation. For the restoration and modernisation of human civilization, this exaggerated outlawing of the fellow citizen whom we see fit to suspect as a traitor or revolutionary and also of the stranger within our gates, has to be restrained and brought back within the scheme of human rights.

Throughout the whole world we see variations of this same subordination of the individual to the organisation of power. Phase by phase these ill-adapted governments are becoming uncontrolled absolutisms; they are killing that free play of the individual mind which is the preservative of human efficiency and happiness. The populations under their sway, after a phase of servile discipline, are plainly doomed to relapse into disorder and violence. Everywhere war and monstrous economic exploitation break out, so that those very same increments of power and opportunity which have brought mankind within sight of an age of limitless plenty, seem likely to be lost again, it may be lost forever, in an ultimate social collapse.

We do not want dictators, we do not want oligarchic parties or class rule, we want a widespread world intelligence conscious of itself. To work out a way to that world brain organization is therefore our primary need in this age of imperative construction.

There has been ... an enormous waste of human mental and physical resources in premature revolutionary thrusts, ill-planned, dogmatic, essentially unscientific reconstructions and restorations of the social order, during the past hundred years. This was the inevitable first result of the discrediting of those old and superseded mental adaptations which were embodied in the institutions and education of the past. They discredited themselves and left the world full of problems.

Oswald Cabal: Little animals. And if we're no more than animals, we must snatch each little scrap of happiness, and live, and suffer, and pass, mattering no more than all the other animals do or have done. It is this, or that. All the universe or nothing. Which shall it be, Passworthy? Which shall it be?

Raymond Passworthy: But... we're such little creatures. Poor humanity's so fragile, so weak. Little... little animals.

Oswald Cabal: Rest enough for the individual man, too much and too soon, and we call it death. But for Man, no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First, this little planet and its winds and ways. And then all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about him, and, at last, out across immensity to the stars. And when he has conquered all the depths of space, and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning...

Raymond Passworthy: Oh, God, is there ever to be any age of happiness? Is there never to be any rest?

John Cabal: If we don't end war, war will end us.

'Pippa' Passworthy: This little upset across the water doesn't mean anything. Threatened men live long and threatened wars never occur.

Oswald Cabal: There's nothing wrong in suffering, if you suffer for a purpose. Our revolution didn't abolish danger or death. It simply made danger and death worthwhile.

Rowena: You've got the subtlety of a bullfrog.

The Boss: The State's your mother, your father, the totality of your interests. No discipline can be too severe for the man that denies that by word or deed.

The Boss: You are not mechanics, you are warriors. You have been trained, not to think, but to do.

Rowena: I don't suppose any man has ever understood any woman since the beginning of things. You don't understand our imaginations, how wild our imaginations can be.