H. G. Wells Quotes

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.

The German people are an orderly, vain, deeply sentimental and rather insensitive people. They seem to feel at their best when they are singing in chorus, saluting or obeying orders.

A world revolution to a higher social order, a world order, or utter downfall lies before us all.

We want to get rid of the militarist not simply because he hurts and kills, but because he is an intolerable thick-voiced blockhead who stands hectoring and blustering in our way of achievement.

The Jews looked for a special savior, a messiah, who was to redeem mankind by the agreeable process of restoring the fabulous glories of David and Solomon, and bringing the whole world at last under the firm but benevolent Jewish heel.

What on earth would a man do with himself, if something did not stand in his way?

...the voice was indisputable. It continued to swear with that breadth and variety that distinguishes the swearing of a cultivated man.

No. I cannot expect you to believe it. Take it as a lie--or a prophecy. Say I dreamed it in the workshop. Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race until I have hatched this fiction. Treat my assertion of its truth as a mere stroke of art to enhance its interest. And taking it as a story, what do you think of it?

There is, though I do not know how there is or why there is, a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven.

I saw a gray-haired man a figure of hale age, sitting at a desk and writing.

A day will come when beings, now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon Earth as a footstool and laugh, and reach out their hands amidst the stars.

Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough---as most wrong theories are!

Marriage isn't what it was. It's become a different thing because women have become human beings.

There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.

Patriotism has become a mere national self assertion, a sentimentality of flag-cheering with no constructive duties.

Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness.

If the world does not please you, you can change it.

We should strive to welcome change and challenges, because they are what help us grow. With out them we grow weak like the Eloi in comfort and security. We need to constantly be challenging ourselves in order to strengthen our character and increase our intelligence.

But I was too restless to watch long; I'm too Occidental for a long vigil. I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours - that's another matter.

I see knowledge increasing and human power increasing, I see everincreasing possibilities before life, and I see no limits set to it all. Existence impresses me as a perpetual dawn. Our lives, as I apprehend them, swim in expectation.

Tell the truth and read story books;it will take you to the magical moment in a glory night.

Fools make researches and wise men exploit them - that is our earthly way of dealing with the question, and we thank Heaven for an assumed abundance of financially impotent and sufficiently ingenious fools.

The Athenian democracy suffered much from that narrowness of patriotism which is the ruin of all nations.

The fact is, the Time Traveller was one of those men who are too clever to be believed: you never felt that you saw all round him; you always suspected some subtle reserve, some ingenuity in ambush, behind his lucid frankness.

The future is the shape of things to come.

It sounds plausible enough tonight, but wait until tomorrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning.

The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature.

A biography should be a dissection and demonstration of how a particular human being was made and worked.

Ignorance is not an extension of time

Leaders should lead as far as they can and then vanish. Their ashes should not choke the fire they have lit.

Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the mind of a pedant), perfection is the mere repudiation of that ineluctable marginal inexactitude which is the mysterious inmost quality of Being

There is no reason whatever to believe that the order of nature has any greater bias in favour of man than it had in favour of the ichthyosaur or the pterodactyl.

New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not belittled the humiliating question arises 'Why then are you not taking part in them?

We're in a blessed drainpipe, and we've got to crawl along it till we die.

I write to cover a frame of ideas.

Biologists can be just as sensitive to heresy as theologians.

Now the most comprehensive conception of this new world is of one politically, socially and economically united To this end a small but increasing body of people in the world set their faces and seek to direct their lives.

The only true measure of success is the ratio between what we might have done and what we might have been on the one hand, and the thing we have made and the things we have made of ourselves on the other.

In England we have come to rely upon a comfortable time-lag of fifty years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it.

Men who think in lifetimes are of little use to statesmanship.

Every time Europe looks across the Atlantic to see the American Eagle, it observes only the rear end of an ostrich.

Life is two things. Life is morality – life is adventure. Squire and master. Adventure rules, and morality looks up the trains in the Bradshaw. Morality tells you what is right, and adventure moves you. If morality means anything it means keeping bounds, respecting implications, respecting implicit bounds. If individuality means anything it means breaking bounds – adventure.

We must be prepared to see an Association of Nations in conference growing into an organic system of world controls for world affairs and the keeping of the world’s peace, or we must be prepared for – a continuation of war.

Indeed Christianity passes. Passes - it has gone! It has littered the beaches of life with churches, cathedrals, shrines and crucifixes, prejudices and intolerances, like the sea urchin and starfish and empty shells and lumps of stinging jelly upon the sands here after a tide. A tidal wave out of Egypt. And it has left a multitude of little wriggling theologians and confessors and apologists hopping and burrowing in the warm nutritious sand. But in the hearts of living men, what remains of it now? Doubtful scraps of Arianism. Phrases. Sentiments. Habits.

The teacher, whether mother, priest, or schoolmaster, is the real maker of history.

The too perfect security of the Upper-worlders had led them to a slow movement of degeneration, a general dwindling in size, strength, and intelligence.

We were not making war against Germany, we were being ordered about in the King's war with Germany.

The art of ignoring is one of the accomplishments of every well-bred girl, so carefully instilled that at last she can even ignore her own thoughts and her own knowledge.