Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness. The work of ameliorating the conditions of life -- the true civilizing process that makes life more and more secure -- had gone steadily on to a climax... And the harvest was what I saw.
H. G. WellsWhile there is a chance of the world getting through its troubles, I hold that a reasonable man has to behave as though he were sure of it. If at the end your cheerfulness in not justified, at any rate you will have been cheerful.
H. G. WellsThe establishment of the world community will surely exact a price – and who can tell what that price may be? – in toil, suffering and blood.
H. G. Wells...the Idumeans (Edomites) were...made Jews...and a Turkish people (Khazars) were mainly Jews in South Russia...The main part of Jewry never was in Judea and had never come out of Judea.
H. G. WellsThe fertilising conflict of individualities is the ultimate meaning of the personal life.
H. G. WellsAs the journalists of the time phased it, this was the epoch of the Leap into the Air. The new atomic aeroplane became indeed a mania; everyone of means was frantic to possess a thing so controllable, so secure and so free from the dust and danger of the road, and in France in the year 1943 thirty thousand of these new aeroplanes were manufactured and licensed, and soared humming softly into the sky.
H. G. WellsIBM is helping to greatly advance and expedite quality sampling while providing our project investigators peace of mind that the information they are gathering is securely stored and protected.
H. G. WellsI often think we do not take this business of photography in a sufficiently serious spirit. Issuing a photograph is like marriage: you can only undo the mischief with infinite woe.
H. G. WellsThere is space in its philosophy for everyone which is one reason why India is a home to every single religion in the world.
H. G. WellsNothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.
H. G. WellsArmament should be an illegality everywhere, and some sort of international force should patrol a treaty-bound world. Partial armament is one of those absurdities dear to moderate-minded 'reasonable' men. Armament itself is making war. Making a gun, pointing a gun, and firing it are all acts of the same order. It should be illegal to construct anywhere upon earth any mechanism for the specific purpose of killing men. When you see a gun it is reasonable to ask: 'Whom is that intended to kill?'
H. G. WellsSailors ought never to go to church. They ought to go to hell, where it is much more comfortable.
H. G. WellsNo one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
H. G. WellsThe serious people who took him seriously never felt quite sure of his deportment; they were somehow aware that trusting their reputations for judgment with him was like furnishing a nursery with egg-shell china.
H. G. WellsFew people who know of the work of Langley, Lilienthal, Pilcher, Maxim and Chanute but will be inclined to believe that long before the year 2000 A.D., and very probably before 1950, a successful aeroplane will have soared and come home safe and sound.
H. G. WellsAfter people have repeated a phrase a great number of times, they begin to realize it has meaning and may even be true.
H. G. WellsBiologically the species is the accumulation of the experiments of all its successful individuals since the beginning.
H. G. WellsThings that would have made fame of a less clever man seemed tricks in his hands. It is a mistake to do things too easily.
H. G. WellsThe ethical system of these men of the New Republic, the ethical system which will dominate the world state, will be shaped primarily to favour the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity — beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds, and a growing body of knowledge — and to check the procreation of base and servile types, of fear-driven and cowardly souls, of all that is mean and ugly and bestial in the souls, bodies, or habits of men.
H. G. WellsThe true sweetness of chess, if it ever can be sweet, is to see a victory snatched, by some happy impertinence, out of the shadow of apparently irrevocable disaster.
H. G. WellsWith wine and food, the confidence of my own table, and the necessity of reassuring my wife, I grew by insensible degrees courageous and secure.
H. G. WellsAnd all over the countryside, he knew, on every crest and hill, where once the hedges had interlaced, and cottages, churches, inns, and farmhouses had nestled among their trees, wind wheels similar to those he saw and bearing like vast advertisements, gaunt and distinctive symbols of the new age, cast their whirling shadows and stored incessantly the energy that flowed away incessantly through all the arteries of the city. ... The great circular shapes of complaining wind-wheels blotted out the heavens.
H. G. WellsMan ... can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way.
H. G. WellsEvery time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.
H. G. WellsThere is no upper limit to what individuals are capable of doing with their minds. There is no age limit that bars them from beginning. There is no obstacle that cannot be overcome if they persist and believe.
H. G. WellsThe third peculiarity of aerial warfare was that it was at once enormously destructive and entirely indecisive.
H. G. WellsLooking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life.
H. G. WellsThere were no object lessons, and the studies of bookkeeping and French were pursued (but never effectually overtaken.
H. G. WellsIf you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn't expecting it.
H. G. WellsNature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change.
H. G. Wells... when the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people ... will hate the New World Order and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to evaluate its promise, we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people.
H. G. WellsPerhaps I am a man of exceptional moods. I do not know how far my experience is common. At times I suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all. This feeling was very strong upon me that night. Here was another side to my dream.
H. G. WellsI must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea.
H. G. WellsFace this world. Learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end you will find clues to it all.
H. G. WellsArson, after all, is an artificial crime...A large number of houses deserve to be burnt.
H. G. WellsA priest is a man vowed, trained, and consecrated, a man belonging to a special corps, and necessarily with an intense esprit de corps. He has given up his life to his temple and his god. This is a very excellent thing for the internal vigour of his own priesthood, his own temple. He lives and dies for the honour of his particular god. But in the next town or village is another temple with another god. It is his constant preoccupation to keep his people from that god. Religious cults and priesthoods are sectarian by nature; they will convert, they will overcome, but they will never coalesce.
H. G. Wells