He came away with an exasperated sense of failure. He denounced parliamentary government root and branch that night. Parliament was doomed. The fact that it had not listened to Rud was only one little conclusive fact in a long indictment. "It has become a series of empty forms, " he said. "All over the world, always, the sawdust of reality is running out of the shapes of quasi-public things. Not one British citizen in a thousand watches what is done in Parliament; not one in a thousand Americans follows the discourses of Congress. Interest has gone. Every election in the past thirty years has been fought on gross misunderstandings. H.G. Wells
About This Quote

Whenever we come across an interesting quote, we should be able to figure out what it is about. In this quote, "sawdust of reality" means the idea that the world has become too detailed and it is hard to understand. The idea is that people don't care about politics and they don't pay attention to things happening in Parliament and Congress. These institutions have become so popular and so detailed that no one truly understands them. Instead, people try to understand them through mass media which does not always present the truth as it really is.

Source: The Holy Terror

Some Similar Quotes
  1. I've been saying it so long to you, you just wouldn't listen. Every time you said 'Farm Boy do this' you thought I was answering 'As you wish' but that's only because you were hearing wrong. 'I love you' was what it was, but you... - William Goldman
  2. How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen... - Margaret Atwood
  3. Living is Easy with Eyes Closed. - John Lennon
  4. There are people who are generic. They make generic responses and they expect generic answers. They live inside a box and they think people who don't fit into their box are weird. But I'll tell you what, generic people are the weird people. They are... - C. Joybell C.
  5. There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action. - Unknown
More Quotes By H.G. Wells
  1. The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.
  2. Be a man! ... What good is religion if it collapses under calamity? Think of what earthquakes and floods, wars and volcanoes, have done before to men! Did you think that God had exempted [us]? He is not an insurance agent.
  3. But I have believed always and taught always that what God demands from man is his utmost effort to cooperate and understand. I have taught the imagination, first and most; I have made knowledge, knowledge of what man is and what man's world is and...
  4. My days I devote to reading and experiments in chemistry, and I spend many of the clear nights in the study of astronomy. There is, though I do not know how there is or why there is, a sense of infinite peace and protection in...
  5. There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, andnot in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever ismore than animal within us must find its solace and its hope. I hope, or Icould not live.
Related Topics