How small the vastest of human catastrophes may seem at a distance of a few million miles.

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. He secretes a house, or 'establishment,' round himself, of inorganic and servile material. All his wild ambitions and subtle æsthetic perceptions atrophy as needless in the presence of calm domesticity. Finally, by virtue of these he settles down-he marries. He becomes dull he enters a profession suckers appear on his head and he studies. Presently, however, he realizes the sober aspect of things. 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.

And here one may note a curious comparison which can be made between this life-history and that of many a respectable pinnacle and gargoyle on the social fabric.

Phase by phase these ill-adapted governments are becoming uncontrolled absolutisms they are killing that free play of the individual mind which is the preservative of human efficiency and happiness. But in every child born of man, Father Redwood, lurks some seed of greatness - waiting for the Food. Great and little cannot understand one another. And here it is! Money and credit are as much human contrivances as bicycles, and as liable to expansion and modification as any other sort of prevalent but imperfect machine. Quotes We were making the future … and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making.

1.13 The Rights of Man, or what are we fighting for? (1940).

1.7 First and Last Things: A Confession of Faith and Rule of Life (1908).

The invisible man herbert george wells