The Island of Dr. Moreau

by H.G. Wells

is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.

His is the House of Pain. “ His is the Hand that makes. “ His is the Hand that wounds. “ His is the Hand that heals.”

The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature.

Had Moreau had any intelligible object I could have sympathised at least a little with him. I am not so squeamish about pain as that. I could have forgiven him a little even had his motive been hate. But he was so irresponsible, so utterly careless. His curiosity, his mad, aimless investigations, drove him on, and the things were thrown out to live a year or so, to struggle and blunder and suffer ; at last to die painfully.

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

I feel as though the animal was surging up through them; that presently the degradation of the Islanders will be played over again on a larger scale.

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.

the manufacture of monsters—and perhaps even quasi-human monsters—is within the possibilities of vivisection.