# The Time Machine ## Metadata * Author: [H.G. Wells](https://www.amazon.comundefined) * ASIN: B00VAOUGR2 * ISBN: 8826430322 * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00VAOUGR2 * [Kindle link](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00VAOUGR2) ## Highlights 'After all, the sanitation and the agriculture of to-day are still in the rudimentary stage. The science of our time has attacked but a little department of the field of human disease, but even so, it spreads its operations very steadily and persistently. Our agriculture and horticulture destroy a weed just here and there and cultivate perhaps a score or so of wholesome plants, leaving the greater number to fight out a balance as they can. We improve our favourite plants and animals—and how few they are—gradually by selective breeding; now a new and better peach, now a seedless grape, now a sweeter and larger flower, now a more convenient breed of cattle. We improve them gradually, because our ideals are vague and tentative, and our knowledge is very limited; because Nature, too, is shy and slow in our clumsy hands. Some day all this will be better organized, and still better. That is the drift of the current in spite of the eddies. The whole world will be intelligent, educated, and co-operating; things will move faster and faster towards the subjugation of Nature. In the end, wisely and carefully we shall readjust the balance of animal and vegetable life to suit our human needs. — location: [419](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00VAOUGR2&location=419) ^ref-5542 --- For after the battle comes Quiet. Humanity had been strong, energetic, and intelligent, and had used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived. And now came the reaction of the altered conditions. — location: [442](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00VAOUGR2&location=442) ^ref-7273 --- 'It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers. — location: [1091](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00VAOUGR2&location=1091) ^ref-39824 --- And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers—shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle—to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man. — location: [1280](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00VAOUGR2&location=1280) ^ref-9777 ---