"Seeing the ease and security in which these people were living, I felt that this close resemblance of the sexes was after all what one would expect; for the strength of a man and the softness of a woman, the institution of the family, and the differentiation of occupations are mere militant necessities of an age of physical force; where population is balanced and abundant, much childbearing becomes an evil rather than a blessing to the State; where violence comes but rarely and off-spring are secure, there is less necessity there is no necessity an efficient family, and the specialization of the sexes with reference to their children's needs disappears. We see some beginning of this even in our own time, and in this future age it was complete."

"At first, proceeding from the problems of our own age, it seemed clear as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer, was the key to the whole position. No doubt it will seem grotesque enough to you–and wildly incredible!–and yet even now there are existing circumstances to point that way. There is a tendency to utilize underground space for the less ornamental purposes of civilization; there is the Metropolitan Railway in London, for instance, there are new electric railways, there are subways, there are underground workrooms and restaurants, and they increase and multiply. Evidently, I thought, this tendency had increased till Industry had gradually lost its birthright in the sky. I mean that it had gone deeper and deeper into larger and ever larger underground factories, spending a still-increasing amount of its time therein, till, in the end–! Even now, does not and East-end worker live in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the natural surface of the earth?"

"In 1890 the Europeans were in the midst of an era that was bringing revolutionary changes to their ways of life. Because no cataclysmic event marked this transformation, some historians have insisted that the growth of an industrial society in Europe was not a revolution in the sense of causing a sudden and drastic change in society. Yet, in the broad perspective of history, the rise of an industrial, technological society in the nineteenth century equals and possible surpasses the agrarian revolution of around 10,000 B.C. as a development that gave men the poser and skill to exploit their environment to their own advantage."

"The genius of The Time Machine is that the answers to all these questions are also a working out of Wells' own beliefs concerning his own world of 1895. Wells was a socialist in the 1890's, and saw the industrialized world dividing itself into the Haves and the Have-nots. The former were blessed, beautiful, careless, benumbed people to Wells, aristocrats at the opera sipping champagne cocktails. The latter were the working class, from whom Wells himself had come. The workers lived in hovels, were dirty and disease-ridden, and died unnaturally early–pale, broken, violent, hatefilled and frightened."