The World Set Free quotes

The history of mankind is the history of the attainment of external power.

Man is the tool-using, fire-making animal. From the outset of his terrestrial career we find him supplementing the natural strength and bodily weapons of a beast by the heat of burning and the rough implement of stone. So he passed beyond the ape.

The history of mankind is the history of the attainment of external power.

Man is the tool-using, fire-making animal.

From the outset of his terrestrial career we find him supplementing the natural strength and bodily weapons of a beast by the heat of burning and the rough implement of stone. So he passed beyond the ape. From that he expands.

Or suddenly he became aware of the scent of another male and rose up roaring, his roars the formless precursors of moral admonitions.

For he was a great individualist, that original, he suffered none other than himself.

So through the long generations, this heavy precursor, this ancestor of all of us, fought and bred and perished, changing almost imperceptibly.

The history of man is not simply the conquest of external power; it is first the conquest of those distrusts and fiercenesses, that self-concentration and intensity of animalism, that tie his hands from taking his inheritance.

The ape in us still resents association.

From the dawn of the age of polished stone to the achievement of the Peace of the World, man’s dealings were chiefly with himself and his fellow man, trading, bargaining, lawmaking, propitiating, enslaving, conquering, exterminating, and every little increment in Power, he turned at once …

“That,” said the schoolboy, after reflection, “is only a model.”

“Model today, man tomorrow.”

The boy seemed divided in his allegiance. Then he decided for what he believed quite firmly to be omniscience. “But old Broomie,” he said, “he told all the boys in his class only yesterday, ‘No man will ever fly.’

“But old Broomie,” he said, “he told all the boys in his class only yesterday, ‘No man will ever fly.’ No one, he says, who has ever shot grouse or pheasants on the wing would ever believe anything of the sort. …”

Yet that boy lived to fly across the Atlantic and edit his father’s reminiscences.

At the close of the nineteenth century as a multitude of passages in the literature of that time witness, it was thought that the fact that man had at last had successful and profitable dealings with the steam that scalded him and the electricity that …

It does noticeably and forcibly what probably all the other elements are doing with an imperceptible slowness.

It is like the single voice crying aloud that betrays the silent breathing multitude in the darkness.

Radium is an element that is breaking up and flying to pieces. But perhaps all elements are doing that at less perceptible rates. Uranium certainly is; thorium—the stuff of this incandescent gas mantle—certainly is; actinium. I feel that we are but beginning the list.

Man will step from the pinnacle of this civilisation to the beginning of the next. I have no eloquence, ladies and gentlemen, to express the vision of man’s material destiny that opens out before me.

I see the desert continents transformed, the poles no longer wildernesses of ice, the whole world once more Eden. I see the power of man reach out among the stars.

…”

… fairly prosperous, fairly happy, fairly well adapted to the lives they had to lead—a week of work and a Sunday of best clothes and mild promenading—and he had launched something that would disorganise the entire fabric that held their contentments and ambitions and satisfactions together.

“Felt like an imbecile who has presented a box full of loaded revolvers to a Crèche,” he notes.

He met a man named Lawson, an old schoolfellow, of whom history now knows only that he was red-faced and had a terrier.

“The Steel Trust is scrapping the whole of its plant,” he shouted. “The State Railways are going to scrap all their engines. Everything’s going to be scrapped—everything.

Come and scrap the Mint, you fellows, come and scrap the Mint!

”

An entry in Holsten’s diary-autobiography, dated five days later, runs: “Still amazed. The law is the most dangerous thing in this country. It is hundreds of years old. It hasn’t an idea.

The oldest of old bottles and this new wine, the most explosive wine.

Something will overtake them.”

“Things came to me like the turning on of a light in a darkened room,” he says. “These men were praying to their fellow creatures as once they prayed to God!

The last thing that men will realise about anything is that it is inanimate.

They had transferred their animation to mankind. They still believed there was intelligence somewhere, even if it was careless or malignant. … It had only to be aroused to be conscience-stricken, to be moved to exertion.

They still believed there was intelligence somewhere, even if it was careless or malignant. … It had only to be aroused to be conscience-stricken, to be moved to exertion. … And I saw, too, that as yet there was no such intelligence.

The world waits for intelligence.

That intelligence has still to be made, that will for good and order has still to be gathered together, out of scraps of impulse and wandering seeds of benevolence and whatever is fine and creative in our souls, into a common purpose.

“Things came to me like the turning on of a light in a darkened room,” he says. “

These men were praying to their fellow creatures as once they prayed to God!

The last thing that men will realise about anything is that it is inanimate. They had transferred their animation to mankind. They still believed there was intelligence somewhere, even if it was careless or malignant.

When I talked of patience and the larger scheme, they answered, ‘But then we shall all be dead’—and I could not make them see, what is so simple to my own mind, that that did not affect the question.

Men who think in lifetimes are of no use to statesmanship.

”

The ostensible governments of the world in the twentieth century were following in the wake of the ostensible religions. They were ceasing to command the services of any but second-rate men.

After the middle of the eighteenth century there are no more great ecclesiastics upon the world’s memory, after the opening of the twentieth no more statesmen.

Everywhere one finds an energetic, ambitious, shortsighted, commonplace type in the seats of authority, blind to the new possibilities and litigiously reliant upon the traditions of the past.

They had but to breathe a word and presently away there, in the world of reality, the punctual myriads moved.

Men rose up and went forward and died.

The fate of nations lay behind the eyes of these three men. Indeed, they were like gods.

It seemed to her beyond the desert of a woman that she should be privileged to participate. …

It is hard to be a woman, full of the stormy impulse to personal devotion, and to have to be impersonal, abstract, exact, punctual.

She must control herself. …

From north and west and south, the allied aeroplanes rose in response and swept down upon this sudden attack. So it was that war in the air began.

Men rode upon the whirlwind that night and slew and fell like archangels. The sky rained heroes upon the astonished earth.

Surely the last fights of mankind were the best. What was the heavy pounding of your Homeric swordsmen, what was the creaking charge of chariots, beside this swift rush, this crash, this giddy triumph, this headlong swoop to death?

Over the populous country below went a strange multitudinous crying and a flurry of alarm bells. …

The surviving aeroplanes turned about and fled out of the sky, like things that suddenly know themselves to be wicked.

…

… submissive in the sleepers all about me, those men who had marched so far, who had left all the established texture of their lives behind them to come upon this mad campaign, this campaign that signified nothing and consumed everything, this mere fever of fighting.

I saw how little and feeble is the life of man, a thing of chances, preposterously unable to find the will to realise even the most timid of its dreams.

And I wondered if always it would be so, if man was a doomed animal who would never to the last days of his time take hold of fate and change it to his will.

Most of the capital cities of the world were burning; millions of people had already perished, and over great areas government was at an end.

Humanity has been compared by one contemporary writer to a sleeper who handles matches in his sleep and wakes to find himself in flames.

For many months it was an open question whether there was to be found throughout all the race the will and intelligence to face these new conditions and make even an attempt to arrest the downfall of the social order.

For a time the war spirit defeated every effort to rally the forces of preservation and construction.

Leblanc seemed to be protesting against earthquakes, and as likely to find a spirit of reason in the crater of Etna.

Even though the shattered official governments now clamoured for peace, bands of irreconcilables and invincible patriots, usurpers, adventurers, and political desperadoes were everywhere in possession of the simple apparatus for the disengagement of atomic energy and the initiation of new centres of destruction.

The stuff exercised an irresistible fascination upon a certain type of mind.

Why should anyone give in while he can still destroy his enemies?

Surrender? While there is still a chance of blowing them to dust? The power of destruction which had once been the ultimate privilege of government was now the only power left in the world—and it was everywhere.

He set to work requisitioning material for his conference with an assurance that was justified by the replies. With a slight incredulity, the conference which was to begin a new order in the world gathered itself together.

Leblanc summoned it without arrogance; he controlled it by virtue of an infinite humility.

Men appeared upon those upland slopes with the apparatus for wireless telegraphy; others followed with tents and provisions; a little cable was flung down to a convenient point upon the Locarno road below.

Never at any time did he betray a doubt that all this chaotic conflict would end.

No nurse during a nursery uproar was ever so certain of the inevitable ultimate peace.

From being treated as an amiable dreamer he came by insensible degrees to be regarded as an extravagant possibility. Then he began to seem even practicable.

“Oh, Firmin,” he went on, “have you no thought for me? Will you never realise that I am not only flesh and blood but an imagination—with its rights.

I am a king in revolt against that fetter they put upon my head. I am a king awake.

My reverend grandparents never in all their august lives had a waking moment. They loved the job that you, you advisers, gave them; they never had a doubt of it. It was like giving a doll to a woman who ought to have a child.

I am a king awake. My reverend grandparents never in all their august lives had a waking moment. They loved the job that you, you advisers, gave them; they never had a doubt of it.

It was like giving a doll to a woman who ought to have a child.

They delighted in processions and opening things and being read addresses to, and visiting triplets and nonagenarians, and all that sort of thing. Incredibly.

It did, Firmin, and if coal had been white instead of black, I have no doubt the authorities would have blackened it. That was the spirit of our treatment. People were always walking about with their faces to us.

One never saw anything in profile.

One got an impression of a world that was insanely focused on ourselves.

“Firmin, we are just going to lay down our differences and take over government. Without any election at all. Without any sanction. The governed will show their consent by silence. If any effective opposition arises we shall ask it to come in and help.

The true sanction of kingship is the grip upon the sceptre.

We aren’t going to worry people to vote for us. I’m certain the mass of men does not want to be bothered with such things. … We’ll contrive a way for anyone interested to join in. That’s quite enough in the way of democracy.

… We’ll contrive a way for anyone interested to join in. That’s quite enough in the way of democracy. Perhaps later—when things don’t matter. … We shall govern all right, Firmin.

Government only becomes difficult when the lawyers get hold of it, and since these troubles began the lawyers are shy.

Indeed, come to think of it, I wonder where all the lawyers are. … Where are they? A lot, of course, were bagged, some of the worst ones, when they blew up my legislature. You never knew the late Lord Chancellor. …

“Man,” said the king, “is always entering upon his heritage. You Americans have a peculiar weakness for anniversaries—if you will forgive me saying so. Yes—I accuse you of a lust for dramatic effect.

Everything is happening always, but you want to say this or this is the real instant in time and subordinate all the others to it.

”

They interrupt. They set back. Suddenly out come the flags and fireworks, and the old enthusiasms are furbished up—and it’s sheer destruction of the proper thing that ought to be going on.

Sufficient unto the day is the celebration thereof.

Let the dead past bury its dead. You see, in regard to the calendar I am for democracy and you are for aristocracy. All things I hold, are august, and have a right to be lived through on their merits.

If one reads the old newspapers and periodicals of that time, which did so much to keep militarism alive, one finds very little about glory and adventure, and a constant harping on the disagreeableness of invasion and subjugation.

In one word, militarism was funk.

The belligerent resolution of the armed Europe of the twentieth century was the resolution of a fiercely frightened sheep to plunge.

and in this atmosphere of moral renaissance there was little attempt to get negotiable advantages out of resistance to the new order.

Human beings are foolish enough no doubt, but few have stopped to haggle in a fire-escape.

The council had its way with them.

And that renegade! He who was once an anointed king! …”

“I hate that sort of eye that laughs and keeps hard,” said the king.

“I won’t sit still here and be caught like a fascinated rabbit,” said the king in conclusion. “We must shift those bombs.”

Presently one of these patches of moonlight came to rest about them and seemed to be following their automobile. The king drew back.

“The things are confoundedly noiseless,” said the king. “It’s like being stalked by lean white cats.”

He peered again. “That fellow is watching us,” he said.

And after the ex-king had given directions in what manner the bombs were to be taken to the new special laboratories above Zurich, where they could be unpacked in an atmosphere of chlorine, he turned to these five still shapes.

Their five pairs of feet stuck out with a curious stiff unanimity.

…

And, unpremeditated, undesired, out of the accumulations of his tilling came civilisation.

Civilisation was the agricultural surplus.

It appeared as trade and tracks and roads, it pushed boats out upon the rivers and presently invaded the seas, and within its primitive courts, within temples grown rich and leisurely and amidst the gathering medley of the seaport towns rose speculation and philosophy and …

Barnet considered the sky, from which a light rain was beginning to fall, the wide fields about them from which the harvest had been taken, the trimmed poplars by the wayside.

“Naturally,” he agreed, “you want to go to Paris. But Paris is over.”

“But then, Monsieur—what is to become—of me?”

Contentious professions cease to be an honourable employment for men. The peace between nations is also a peace between individuals.

We live in a world that comes of age.

Man the warrior, man the lawyer, and all the bickering aspects of life, pass into obscurity; the grave dreamers, man the curious learner and man the creative artist, come forward to replace these barbaric aspects of existence by a less ignoble adventure.

Man the warrior, man the lawyer, and all the bickering aspects of life, pass into obscurity; the grave dreamers, man the curious learner and man the creative artist, come forward to replace these barbaric aspects of existence by a less ignoble adventure.

There is no natural life of man. He is and always has been a sheath of varied and even incompatible possibilities, a palimpsest of inherited dispositions.

It was the habit of many writers in the early twentieth century to speak of competition and the narrow, private life of trade and saving and suspicious isolation as though such things were in some exceptional way proper to the human constitution, and as though …

Once the world was released from the hardening insecurities of a needless struggle for life that was collectively planless and individually absorbing, it became apparent that there was in the vast mass of people a long smothered passion to make things.

The world broke out into making, and at first mainly into aesthetic making.

This phase of history, which has been not inaptly termed the “Efflorescence,” is still, to a large extent, with us.

they are only one shade less harrowing to a sympathetic observer than the scratchings one finds upon the walls of the old prisons, but there they are, witnessing to the poor buried instincts that struggled up towards the light.

That god of joyous expression our poor fathers ignorantly sought, our freedom has declared to us.

…

And what made this desire for freedom and prosperity so strong, was very evidently the dream of self-expression, of doing something with it, of playing with it, of making a personal delightfulness, a distinctiveness.

Property was never more than a means to an end, nor avarice more than a perversion. Men owned in order to do freely.

Now that everyone has his own apartments and his own privacy secure, this disposition to own has found its release in a new direction.

It is a mistake to regard it as anything but a plain statement of fact. It is the basis for your work. You have to teach self-forgetfulness, and everything else that you have to teach is contributory and subordinate to that end.

Education is the release of man from self.

You have to widen the horizons of your children, encourage and intensify their curiosity and their creative impulses, and cultivate and enlarge their sympathies. That is what you are for.

“I suppose,” said Karenin, “that my spirit has had its use. But if you think that is because my body is as it is, I think you are mistaken.

There is no peculiar virtue in defect.

I have always chafed against—all this. If I could have moved more freely and lived a larger life in health I could have done more. But some day perhaps you will be able to put a body that is wrong altogether right again.

“For endless generations man has struggled upward against the indignities of his body—and the indignities of his soul. Pains, incapacities, vile fears, black moods, despairs. How well I’ve known them. They’ve taken more time than all your holidays.

It is true, is it not, that every man is something of a cripple and something of a beast?

I’ve dipped a little deeper than most, that’s all. It’s only now, when he has fully learnt the truth of that, that he can take hold of himself to be neither beast nor cripple.

“Yes,” he said at last, “I am afraid of these anaesthetics and these fag-ends of life.

It’s life we are all afraid of.

Death!—nobody minds just death. Fowler is clever—but some day surgery will know its duty better and not be so anxious just to save something. … Provided only that it quivers. I’ve tried to hold my end up properly and do my work.

“

I do not see why life should be judged by its last trailing thread of vitality.

… I know it for the splendid thing it is—I who have been a diseased creature from the beginning. I know it well enough not to confuse it with its husks.

… Don’t believe what I may say at the last. … If the fabric is good enough the selvage doesn’t matter. It can’t matter.

So long as you are alive you are just the moment, perhaps, but when you are dead then you are all your life from the first moment to the last.

…”

But do tricks for us, little limited tricks. Give us cheap lighting. And cure us of certain disagreeable things, cure us of cancer, cure us of consumption, cure our colds and relieve us after repletion. …’ We have changed all that, Gardener.

Science is no longer our servant. We know it for something greater than our little individual selves.

It is the awakening mind of the race, and in a little while—in a little while—I wish indeed I could watch for that little while, now that the curtain has risen. …

every year in London the cars and omnibuses alone killed or disabled twenty thousand people; in Paris it was worse; people used to fall dead for want of air in the crowded ways. The irritation of London, internal and external, must have been maddening.

It was a maddened world. It is like thinking of a sick child.

One has the same effect of feverish urgencies and acute irrational disappointments.

Everybody must have been taking pills. In one of the hotel rooms in the Strand they have found the luggage of a lady covered up by falling rubble and unburnt, and she was equipped with nine different sorts of pill and tabloid.

The pill-carrying age followed the weapon-carrying age.

They are equally strange to us. People’s skins must have been in a vile state. Very few people were properly washed; they carried the filth of months on their clothes. All the clothes they wore were old clothes;

He trampled on ten thousand lovely things, and a kind of malice in these louts made it pleasant to them to see him trample. No—he was no child; the dull, national aggressiveness he stood for, no childishness.

Childhood is promise. He was survival.

“All Europe offered its children to him; it sacrificed education, art, happiness, and all its hopes of future welfare to follow the clatter of his sabre. The monstrous worship of that old fool’s ‘blood and iron’ passed all round the earth.

It chanced he had a Daguerreotype of the old sinner, and the two were marvellously alike. One felt that a little juggling with time and either might have been the other.

People are cruel and stupid in a stupid age who might be gentle and splendid in a gracious one.

The world also has its moods. Think of the mental food of Bismarck’s childhood; the humiliations of Napoleon’s victories, the crowded, crowning victory of the Battle of the Nations.

… Everybody in those days, wise or foolish, believed that the division of the world under a multitude of governments was inevitable, and that it was going on for thousands of years more.

It was inevitable until it was impossible.

Anyone who had denied that inevitability publicly would have been counted—oh! a silly fellow. Old Bismarck was only just a little—forcible, on the lines of the accepted ideas. That is all.

“Man lives in the dawn forever,” said Karenin. “

Life is beginning and nothing else but beginning. It begins everlastingly.

Each step seems vaster than the last, and does but gather us together for the nest. This Modern State of ours, which would have been a Utopian marvel a hundred years ago, is already the commonplace of life.

Karenin shook his head. “

You cannot stay at the roots and climb the tree

,” he said. …

You, too, Kahn! There are endless years yet for you—and all full of learning. … We carry an excessive burden of sex and sexual tradition still, and we have to free ourselves from it. We do free ourselves from it.

We have learnt in a thousand different ways to hold back death, and this sex, which in the old barbaric days was just sufficient to balance our dying, is now like a hammer that has lost its anvil, it plunges through human life.

You poets, you young people want to turn it to delight. Turn it to delight. That may be one way out.

Isn’t it love, sexual love, which has released the imagination? Without that stir, without that impulse to go out from ourselves, to be reckless of ourselves and wonderful, would our lives be anything more than the contentment of the stalled ox?”

“The key that opens the door,” said Karenin, “is not the goal of the journey.”

“But women!” cried Rachel. “Here we are! What is our future—as women? Is it only that we have unlocked the doors of the imagination for you men? Let us speak of this question now. It is a thing constantly in my thoughts, Karenin.

That was the drama, that was life. And the jealousy of these demands was the master motive in the world. You said, Kahn, a little while ago that sexual love was the key that let one out from the solitude of self, but

I tell you that so far it has only done so in order to lock us all up again in a solitude of two.

… All that may have been necessary but it is necessary no longer. All that has changed and changes still very swiftly. Your future, Rachel, as women, is a diminishing future.”