“The descendents of man will nourish themselves by immersion in nutritive fluid. They will have enormous brains, liquid, soulful eyes, and large hands, on which they will hop. No craggy nose will they have, no vestigial ears; their mouths will be a small, perfectly round aperture, unanimal, like the evening star. Their whole muscular system will be shriveled to nothing, a dangling pendant to their minds.”

— Herbert Wells (1893), “Man of the Year Million” [1]

“In the early nineteen-twenties it had become clear that natural science and technology would continue their triumphant advances while the social and humane studies, in order to reduce their tragic lag, would need to be equipped with methods far more effective than archaic types of merely verbal reasoning. With untrammeled enthusiasm of a youthful PhD in physics, I expected to find a general sympathy with this [social physics] program but the case was otherwise. There is a proverb that ‘in the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king’, the falsity of which has been depicted in the story by H.G. Wells. One has to find for himself that in the country of the blind—meaning university faculties and their learned societies—the one-eyed man meets with lifted eyebrows.”

— John Q. Stewart (c.1955), commentary on the friction involved in his decade-long effort to get “social physics” established at Princeton

“He was a practical electrician fond of whiskey, a heavy, red-haired brute with irregular teeth. He doubted the existence of a deity but accepted Carnot’s cycle, and he had read Shakespeare and found him weak in chemistry.”

— H.G. Wells (1906), "Lord of the Dynamos" (Ѻ); in: The Door in the Wall, and Other Stories (see: thermodynamic bible) [1]