Herbert George Wells

“ Assuredly youth will come to us, if this is indeed to be the dawn of a new time. Without the high resolve of youth, without the constant accession of youth, without recuperative power, no sustained forward movement is possible in the world. ”

“ As for us others, we plant a tree never believing we shall eat the fruit, we build a house never hoping to live therein. The desert, we believe in our hearts, is our home and our destined grave, and whatever we see of the Promised Land we must see through the eyes of the young. ”

“ In a little while they are beautiful children, they are boys and girls and youths and maidens, full of the zest of new life, full of an abundant, joyful receptivity. In a little while they are walking with us, seeking to know whither we go, and whither we lead them, and why. Our account of the men-makers is not complete until we add to birth and school and world, the increasing element of deliberate co-operation in the man or woman we are seeking to make. ”

“ And while we scattered pioneers and experimenters piece together our efforts into a coherent scheme, while we become more and more clearly conscious of our common purpose, year by year the old order and those who have anchylosed to the old order, die and pass away, and the unhampered children of the new time grow up about us. ”

“ It is to youth, therefore, that this book is finally addressed, to the adolescents, to the students, to those who are yet in the schools and who will presently come to read it, to those who being still plastic can understand the infinite plasticity of the world. It is those who are yet unmade who must become the makers. After thirty there are few conversions and fewer fine beginnings; men and women go on in the path they have marked out for themselves. ”

“ It insists as a cardinal necessity, not indeed as an end, but as an indispensable instrument by which this world State must be made and sustained, upon a great, a contemporary, and a universally accessible literature—a literature not simply of thought and science, but of power, which shall embody and make real and living the sustaining dreams of the coming time, and which shall draw together and bring into intelligent correlation all those men and women who are working now discontentedly and wastefully towards a better order of life. ”

“ And coming to our help, to reinforce us, to supersede us, to take the growing task out of our hands, will come youth, will come our sons and daughters, and those for whom we have written our books, for whom we have taught in our schools, for whom we have founded and ordered libraries, toiled in laboratories and in waste places and strange lands ”

“ In a few years this that I call New Republicanism here, under I know not what final name, will have become a great world movement, conscious of itself and consistent within itself, and we who are making now the crude discovery of its possibility will be working towards its realization in our thousand different ways and positions. ”

“ He must be ruled by duties and a certain ritual in life. Every day and every week he must set aside time to read and to think, to commune with others and himself; he must be as jealous of his health and strength as the Levites of old. ”

“ But he will seek perpetually to gauge his quality, he will watch to see himself the master of his habits and of his powers; he will take his brain, blood, body, and lineage as a trust to be administered for the world. ”

“ Their imaginations have become firm and rigid, even if they have not withered, and there is no turning them from the conviction of their brief experience that almost all that is, is inexorably so. Accomplished things obsess us more and more. What man or woman over thirty in Great Britain dares to hope for a republic before it is time to die? ”