A Modern Utopia Quotes

“Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the mind of a pedant), perfection is the mere repudiation of that ineluctable marginal inexactitude which is the mysterious inmost quality of Being”
― H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia

“It is good to stop by the track for a space, put aside the knapsack, wipe the brows, and talk a little of the upper slopes of the mountain we think we are climbing, would but the trees let us see it.”
― H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia

“Modern war, modern international hostility is, I believe, possible only through the stupid illiteracy of the mass of men and the conceit and intellectual indolence of rulers and those who feed the public mind.”
― H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia

“Perfection is the mere repudiation of that ineluctable marginal inexactitude which is the mysterious inmost quality of being.”
― H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia

“But in truth, a general prohibition in a state may increase the sum of liberty, and a general permission may diminish it. It does not follow, as these people would have us believe, that a man is more free where there is least law and more restricted where there is most law.”
― H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia

“I feel to think, he thinks to feel. It is I and my kind that have the wider range, because we can be impersonal as well as personal. We can escape ourselves.”
― H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia

“The energy developed and the employment afforded by the State will descend like water that the sun has sucked out of the sea to fall upon a mountain range, and back to the sea again it will come at last, debouching in ground rent and royalty and license fees, in the fees of travellers and profits upon carrying and coinage and the like, in death duty, transfer tax, legacy and forfeiture, returning to the sea. Between the clouds and the sea it will run, as a river system runs, down through a great region of individual enterprise and interplay, whose freedom it will sustain. In that intermediate region between the kindred heights and deeps those beginnings and promises will arise that are the essential significance, the essential substance, of life.”
― H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia

“From our human point of view the mountains and sea are for the habitable lands that lie between. So likewise the State is for Individualities. The State is for Individuals, the law is for freedoms, the world is for experiment, experience, and change: these are the fundamental beliefs upon which a modern Utopia must go.”
― H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia

“To the on-looker, both Individualism and Socialism are, in the absolute, absurdities ; the one would make men the slaves of the violent or rich, the other the slaves of the State official, and the way of sanity runs, perhaps even sinuously, down the intervening valley.”
― H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia

“In this state of impotent expertness, however, or in some equally unsound state, economics must struggle on—a science that is no science, a floundering lore wallowing in a mud of statistics—until either the study of the material organisation of production on the one hand as a development of physics and geography, or the study of social aggregation on the other, renders enduring foundations possible.”
― H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia

“From its beginning the earthly study of economics has been infertile and unhelpful, because of the mass of unanalysed and scarcely suspected assumptions upon which it rested. The facts were ignored that trade is a bye-product and not an essential factor in social life, that property is a plastic and fluctuating convention, that value is capable of impersonal treatment only in the case of the most generalised requirements.”
― H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia

“Equally strong in the normal civilised man is the desire for freedom of movement and the desire for a certain privacy, for a corner definitely his, and we have to consider where the line of reconciliation comes.”
― H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia

“Consider how much liberty we gain by the loss of the common liberty to kill.”
― H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia

“Let us drink more particularly to the coming of the day when men beyond there will learn to distinguish between qualitative and quantitative questions, to temper good intentions with good intelligence, and righteousness with wisdom. One of the darkest evils of our world is surely the unteachable wildness of the Good.”
― H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia

“Down the mountain we shall go and down the passes, and as the valleys open the world will open, Utopia, where men and women are happy and laws are wise, and where all that is tangled and confused in human affairs has been unravelled and made right.”
― H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia

“until under the stimulus of accumulating material, accumulating investments or other circumstances, the tide of private enterprise flowed again.”
― H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia

“The fertilising conflict of individualities is the ultimate meaning of the personal life.”
― H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia

“Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the mind of a pedant), perfection is the mere repudiation of that ineluctable marginal exactitude which is the mysterious inmost quality of Being.”
― H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia

“That, after all, is our purpose, to imagine our best and strive for it, and it is a worse folly and a worse sin than presumption, to abandon striving because the best of all our bests looks mean amidst the suns.”
― H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia

“Every economic dissertation and discussion reminds one more strongly than the last of the game of croquet Alice played in Wonderland”
― H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia: By H. G. Wells - Illustrated