“Every citizen knows his place. He is born to that place, and the elaborate discipline of training and education and surgery he undergoes fits him at last so completely to it that he has neither ideas nor organs for any purpose beyond it.”
Source: The First Men in the Moon (1901), Ch. 24: The Natural History of the Selenites
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H. G. Wells 142
English writer 1866–1946Related quotes

Billie Jean King, winner of 39 Grand Slams, after Federer won the 2009 French Open Final http://sports.yahoo.com/ten/news?slug=reu-openfederergreat&prov=reuters&type=lgns

“I don't agree with any ideas he puts forth in his writing, but that is neither here nor there.”
Introduction to The Golden Man (1980)
Context: Several years ago, when I was ill, Heinlein offered his help, anything he could do, and we had never met; he would phone me to cheer me up and see how I was doing. He wanted to buy me an electric typewriter, God bless him — one of the few true gentlemen in this world. I don't agree with any ideas he puts forth in his writing, but that is neither here nor there. One time when I owed the IRS a lot of money and couldn't raise it, Heinlein loaned the money to me. I think a great deal of him and his wife; I dedicated a book to them in appreciation. Robert Heinlein is a fine-looking man, very impressive and very military in stance; you can tell he has a military background, even to the haircut. He knows I'm a flipped-out freak and still he helped me and my wife when we were in trouble. That is the best in humanity, there; that is who and what I love.

The Decline of the West (1918, 1923)
Context: The press to-day is an army with carefully organized arms and branches, with journalists as officers, and readers as soldiers. But here, as in every army, the soldier obeys blindly, and war-aims and operation-plans change without his knowledge. The reader neither knows, nor is allowed to know, the purposes for which he is used, nor even the role that he is to play. A more appalling caricature of freedom of thought cannot be imagined. Formerly a man did not dare to think freely. Now he dares, but cannot; his will to think is only a willingness to think to order, and this is what he feels as his liberty.

Conversation of 1930
Personal Recollections (1981)

Quoted in The Perfect Way in Diet by Anna Kingsford (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1881), p. 14 https://archive.org/stream/perfectwayindie00kinggoog#page/n36.

“No one should try to live if he has not completed his training as a victim.”
All Gall Is Divided (1952)