Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change.
H. G. WellsRead
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
Interpretation
Human progress relies on education to prevent disasters.
H. G. Wells emphasizes the idea that as civilization advances, the challenges and dangers it faces grow more complex. The quote suggests that education is the key tool in navigating these complexities and avoiding potential catastrophes. Without a strong focus on education, society risks facing dire consequences.
In practice
During a graduation speech to motivate students.
Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change.
He spares no resource in telling of his dead inventions... Bare verbs he rarely tolerates. He splits infinitives and fills them up with adverbial stuffing. He presses the passing colloquialism into his service. His vast paragraphis sweat and struggle; the
It [a new world order] needs only that the governments of Britain, the United States, France, Germany, and Russia should get together in order to set up an effective control of currency, credit, production, and distribution – that is to say, an effective ‘dictatorship of prosperity,’ for the whole world. The other sixty odd States would have to join in or accommodate themselves to the over-ruling decisions of these major Powers.
Things that would have made fame of a less clever man seemed tricks in his hands. It is a mistake to do things too easily.
But I was too restless to watch long; I'm too Occidental for a long vigil. I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours - that's another matter.
The greatest task of democracy, its ritual and feast - is choice.
The author who benefits you most is not the one who tells you something you did not know before, but the one who gives expression to the truth that has been dumbly struggling in you for utterance.
Of all the inanimate objects, of all men's creations, books are the nearest to us for they contain our very thoughts, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to the truth, and our persistent leanings to error. But most of all they resemble us in their precious hold on life.
I am a historian. With the exception of being a wife and mother, it is who I am. And there is nothing I take more seriously.
We need a pedagogy free from fear and focused on the magic of children's innate quest for information and understanding.
I went to the trash pile at Tuskegee Institute and started my laboratory with bottles, old fruit jars and any other thing I found I could use. ... [The early efforts were] worked out almost wholly on top of my flat topped writing desk and with teacups, glasses, bottles and reagents I made myself.
We live in a moment and a culture when reading is really endangered. There's simply no way to write well, though, if you're not reading well.
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