They complacently assumed a necessary progress towards which they had no moral responsibility. They did not realise that this security of progress was a thing still to be won — or lost, and that the time to win it was a time that passed.
Book 1908
The War in the Air quotes
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About the book
Bert Smallways, a restless young bicycle-shop man from a London suburb, is carried off by accident in a runaway balloon and ends up aboard a German airship fleet as it sets out to strike across the Atlantic. Through his eyes Wells imagines the first great war fought from the sky, and what aerial bombing might do to cities, nations and the confidence of a mechanical age.
6 quotes
Tom Smallways: You can say what you like… It didn't ought ever to 'ave begun.
The development of Science had altered the scale of human affairs. By means of rapid mechanical traction, it had brought men nearer together, so much nearer socially, economically, physically, that the old separations into nations and kingdoms were no longer…
Kurt: Think of it, Smallways: there's war everywhere! They're smashing up their civilisation before they have made it. … The war comes through the air, bombs drop in the night. Quiet people go out in the morning, and see air-fleets passing overhead — dripping…
Tom Smallways: This here Progress… it keeps on. Tom Smallways: You'd hardly think it could keep on.
It was the dissolution of an age; it was the collapse of the civilisation that had trusted to machinery, and the instruments of its destruction were machines. But while the collapse of the previous great civilisation, that of Rome, had been a matter of…