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

H. G. Wells book The Shape of Things to Come

Things to Come (1936)

Animals

“It seemed to me that all over the world intelligent people were waking up to the indignity and absurdity of being endangered, restrained, and impoverished, by a mere uncritical adhesion to traditional governments, traditional ideas of economic life, and traditional forms of behaviour, and that these awaking intelligent people must constitute first a protest and then a creative resistance to the inertia that was stifling and threatening us. These people I imagined would say first, "We are drifting; we are doing nothing worth while with our lives. Our lives are dull and stupid and not good enough."”

H. G. Wells book The Open Conspiracy

The Open Conspiracy (1928)

Life , People , Stupidity , World

“I believe that the crazy combative patriotism that plainly threatens to destroy civilisation to-day is very largely begotten by the schoolmaster and the schoolmistress in their history lessons. They take the growing mind at a naturally barbaric phase and they inflame and fix its barbarism.”

H. G. Wells

The Informative Content of Education http://books.google.com/books?&id=vLs4AAAAMAAJ&q=%22I+believe+that+the+crazy+combative+patriotism+that+plainly+threatens+to+destroy+civilisation+to-day+is+very+largely+begotten+by+the+schoolmaster+and+the+schoolmistress+in+their+history+lessons+They+take+the+growing+mind+at+a+naturally+barbaric+phase+and+they+inflame+and+fix+its+barbarism%22&pg=PA242#v=onepage Speech http://archive.org/stream/reportofbritisha37adva#page/242/mode/2up given at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Nottingham, England on 2 September 1937

History , Nature

“A time when all such good things will be for all men may be coming more nearly than we think. Each one who believes that brings the good time nearer; each heart that fails delays it.”

H. G. Wells book The Outline of History

The Outline of History (1920)

Men , Thinking , Time , Heart

“The third peculiarity of aerial warfare was that it was at once enourmously destructive and entirely indecisive.”

H. G. Wells book The War in the Air

The War in the Air (1907), Ch. VIII, §1

Indecision

“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!”

H. G. Wells book The First Men in the Moon

Source: The First Men in the Moon (1901), Ch. 13: Mr. Cavor Makes Some Suggestions

Religion , Way , Idea , Passion

“Great and strange ideas transcending experience often have less effect upon men and women than smaller, more tangible considerations.”

H. G. Wells book The Invisible Man

Source: The Invisible Man (1897), Chapter 10: Mr. Marvel's Visit To Iping

Women , Men , Idea

“You see, I went on with this research just the way it led me. That is the only way I ever heard of true research going. I asked a question, devised some method of obtaining an answer, and got — a fresh question. Was this possible or that possible? You cannot imagine what this means to an investigator, what an intellectual passion grows upon him! You cannot imagine the strange, colourless delight of these intellectual desires!”

H. G. Wells book The Island of Doctor Moreau

Source: The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Ch. 14: Doctor Moreau Explains

Way , Imagination , Question , Passion

“Humanity either makes, or breeds, or tolerates all its afflictions, great or small.”

H. G. Wells book Joan and Peter

Joan and Peter: The Story of an Education (1918)

Affliction

“An animal may be ferocious and cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie.”

H. G. Wells book The Island of Doctor Moreau

Source: The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Ch. 21: The Reversion of the Beast Folk

Lie , Animals

“I was never a great amorist, though I have loved several people very deeply.”

H. G. Wells

An Experiment in Autobiography http://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/wellshg-autobiography/wellshg-autobiography-00-h-dir/wellshg-autobiography-00-h.html (1934)

Love , People

“In England we have come to rely upon a comfortable time lag of fifty years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it.”

H. G. Wells

The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind, Ch. 11 (1931)

Time

“And here one may note a curious comparison which can be made between this [ascidian] life-history and that of many a respectable pinnacle and gargoyle on the social fabric. Every respectable citizen of the professional classes passes through a period of activity and imagination, of "liveliness and eccentricity," of "Sturm und Drang." He shocks his aunts. Presently, however, he realizes the sober aspect of things. He becomes dull; he enters a profession; suckers appear on his head; and he studies. Finally, by virtue of these he settles down—he marries. All his wild ambitions and subtle æsthetic perceptions atrophy as needless in the presence of calm domesticity. He secretes a house, or "establishment," round himself, of inorganic and servile material. His Bohemian tail is discarded. Henceforth his life is a passive receptivity to what chance and the drift of his profession bring along; he lives an almost entirely vegetative excrescence on the side of a street, and in the tranquillity of his calling finds that colourless contentment that replaces happiness.”

H. G. Wells book Zoological Retrogression

Zoological Retrogression (1891)

Life , Secret , Imagination , History

“These creatures you have seen are animals carven and wrought into new shapes. To that, to the study of the plasticity of living forms, my life has been devoted. I have studied for years, gaining in knowledge as I go. I see you look horrified, and yet I am telling you nothing new. It all lay in the surface of practical anatomy years ago, but no one had the temerity to touch it.”

H. G. Wells book The Island of Doctor Moreau

Source: The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Ch. 14: Doctor Moreau Explains

Knowledge , Animals , Life , Study

“For adaptations based on the novel see The War of the Worlds (disambiguation).”

H. G. Wells book The War of the Worlds

The War of the Worlds (1898)

World , War

“So indurated was I at that time to the abomination of the place, that I heard without a touch of emotion the puma victim begin another day of torture. It met its persecutor with a shriek, almost exactly like that of an angry virago.”

H. G. Wells book The Island of Doctor Moreau

Source: The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Ch. 17: A Catastrophe

Time

“I fell indeed into a morbid state, deep and enduring, and alien to fear, which has left permanent scars upon my mind. I must confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world when I saw it suffering the painful disorder of this island. A blind Fate, a vast pitiless Mechanism, seemed to cut and shape the fabric of existence; and I, Moreau (by his passion for research), Montgomery (by his passion for drink), the Beast People with their instincts and mental restrictions, were torn and crushed, ruthlessly, inevitably, amid the infinite complexity of its incessant wheels.”

H. G. Wells book The Island of Doctor Moreau

Source: The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Ch. 16: How the Beast Folk Tasted Blood

Pain , Faith , Drink , Fate

“I had to act with the utmost circumspection to save myself from the suspicion of insanity. My memory of the Law, of the two dead sailors, of the ambuscades of the darkness, of the body in the canebrake, haunted me; and, unnatural as it seems, with my return to mankind came, instead of that confidence and sympathy I had expected, a strange enhancement of the uncertainty and dread I had experienced during my stay upon the island. No one would believe me; I was almost as queer to men as I had been to the Beast People. I may have caught something of the natural wildness of my companions. They say that terror is a disease, and anyhow I can witness that for several years now a restless fear has dwelt in my mind, such a restless fear as a half-tamed lion cub may feel.”

H. G. Wells book The Island of Doctor Moreau

Source: The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Ch. 22: The Man Alone

Confidence , Law , Dead , People

“I do not deny that force has to be used, but I think the forms of the struggle should fit as closely as possible to the opportunities presented by the existing laws, which must be defended against reactionary attacks. There is no need to disorganise the old system, because it is disorganising itself enough as it is. That is why it seems to me insurrection against the old orders, against the law, is obsolete, old-fashioned.”

H. G. Wells

“Stalin-Wells Talk: The Verbatim Report and A Discussion”, G.B. Shaw, J.M. Keynes et al., London, The New Statesman and Nation, (1934) p. 15

Fashion , Thinking , Law