They did not think politics was a great constructive process, they thought it was a kind of dog-fight. They wanted fun, they wanted spice, they wanted hits, they wanted also a chance to say “‘Ear, ‘ear!” in an intelligent and honourable manner and clap their hands and drum with their feet. The great constructive process in history gives so little scope for clapping and drumming and saying “‘Ear, ‘ear!” One might as well think of hounding on the solar system.
There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives.
Things have been, says the legal mind, and so we are here. The creative mind says we are here because things have yet to be.
Particularly nauseous were the blank expressionless faces of people in trains and omnibuses; they seemed no more my fellow-creatures than dead bodies would be, so that I did not dare to travel unless I was assured of being alone.
The man’s become inhuman, I tell you,” said Kemp. “I am as sure he will establish a reign of terror – so soon as he has got over the emotions of this escape – as I am sure I am talking to you. Our only chance is to be ahead. He has cut himself off from his kind. His blood be upon his own head.
You can show black is white by argument,′ said Filby, ’but you will never convince me.
I am just a human being – solid, needing food and drink, needing covering too – But I’m invisible. You see? Invisible. Simple idea. Invisible.
I say I became habituated to the Beast People, that a thousand things which had seemed unnatural and repulsive speedly became natural an ordinary to me. I suppose everything in existence takes its colour from the average hue of our surroundings.
Every conceivable sort of silly creature that has ever been created has been sent to cross me.
I perceived that I was hungry, and prepared to clamber out of the hammock, which, very politely anticipating my intention, twisted round and deposited me upon all-fours on the floor.
There is only one sort of man who is absolutely to blame for his own misery, and that is the man who finds life dull and dreary.
Most of the social and political ills from which you suffer are under your control, given only the will and courage to change them. You can live in another and a wiser fashion if you choose to think it out and work it out. You are not awake to your own power.
There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope. I hope, or I could not live.
His grey eyes shone and twinkled, and his usually pale face was flushed and animated.
Few people realize the immensity of vacancy.
A federation of all humanity, together with a sufficient measure of social justice, to ensure health, education, and a rough equality of opportunity to most of the children born into the world, would mean such a release and increase of human energy as to open a new phase in human history.
Something – exactly like a finger and thumb it felt – nipped my nose.
She was exactly like a child. She wanted to be with me always. She tried to follow me everywhere, and on my next journey out and about it went to my heart to tire her down, and leave her at last, exhausted and calling after me rather plaintively. But the problems of the world had to be mastered. I had not, I said to myself, come into the future to carry on a miniature flirtation.
I thought I was killing myself and I did not care.
I did not feel then that I was lonely, that I had come out from the world into a desolate place. I appreciated my loss of sympathy, but I put it down to the general inanity of things.