You are not mechanics, you are warriors. You have been trained, not to think, but to do.
H. G. WellsHe began to realize that you cannot even fight happily with creatures that stand upon a different mental basis to yourself.
H. G. WellsWhen the mind grapples with a great and intricate problem, it makes its advances step by step, with but little realization of the gains it has made, until suddenly, with an effect of abrupt illumination, it realizes its victory.
H. G. WellsThis isn't a war," said the artilleryman. "It never was a war, any more than there's war between man and ants.
H. G. WellsIt is only now and then, in a jungle, or amidst the towering white menace of a burnt or burning Australian forest, that Nature strips the moral veils from vegetation and we apprehend its stark ferocity.
H. G. WellsI believe that now and always the conscious selection of the best for reproduction will be impossible; that to propose it is to display a fundamental misunderstanding of what individuality implies. The way of nature has always been to slay the hindmost, and there is still no other way, unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmost being born. It is in the sterilization of failure, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies.
H. G. WellsFew people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe swims.
H. G. WellsMankind which began in a cave and behind a windbreak will end in the disease-soaked ruins of a slum.
H. G. Wells...instead of offering me a Garibaldi biscuit, she asked me with that faint lisp of hers, to 'have some squashed flies, George'.
H. G. WellsNo place is safe - no place is at peace. There is no place where a women and her daughter can hide and be at peace. The war comes through the air, bombs drop in the night. Quiet people go out in the morning, and see air-fleets passing overhead - dripping death - dripping death!
H. G. WellsIf all the animals and man had been evolved in this ascendant manner, then there had been no first parents, no Eden, and no Fall. And if there had been no fall, then the entire historical fabric of Christianity, the story of the first sin and the reason for an atonement ... collapsed like a house of cards.
H. G. WellsThe cat, which is a solitary beast, is single minded and goes its way alone, but, the dog, like his master, is confused in his mind.
H. G. WellsFind the thing you want to do most intensely, make sure that’s it, and do it with all your might. If you live, well and good. If you die, well and good. Your purpose is done
H. G. WellsAfter your first day of cycling, one dream is inevitable. A memory of motion lingers in the muscles of your legs, and round and round they seem to go. You ride through Dreamland on wonderful dream bicycles that change and grow.
H. G. WellsI stood staring, not as yet realising that this was death leaping from man to man in that little distant crowd.
H. G. WellsIn the middle years of the nineteenth century there first became abundant in this strange world of ours a class of men, men tending for the most part to become elderly, who are called, and who are very properly called, but who dislike extremely to be called--"Scientists.
H. G. WellsThe weaving of mankind into one community does not imply the creation of a homogeneous community, but rather the reverse; the welcome and adequate utilization of distinctive quality in an atmosphere of understanding.... Communities all to one pattern, like boxes of toy soldiers, are things of the past, rather than of the future.
H. G. WellsScience is a match that man has just got alight. He thought he was in a room - in moments of devotion, a temple - and that his light would be reflected from and display walls inscribed with wonderful secrets and pillars carved with philosophical systems wrought into harmony. It is a curious sensation, now that the preliminary splutter is over and the flame burns up clear, to see his hands and just a glimpse of himself and the patch he stands on visible, and around him, in place of all that human comfort and beauty he anticipated - darkness still.
H. G. WellsBut there are times when the little cloud spreads, until it obscures the sky. And those times I look around at my fellow men and I am reminded of some likeness of the beast-people, and I feel as though the animal is surging up in them. And I know they are neither wholly animal nor holy man, but an unstable combination of both.
H. G. WellsI felt the first inkling of a thing that presently grew quite clear in my mind, that oppressed me for many days, a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer a master, but an animal among the animals, under the Martian heel.With us it would be as with them, to lurk and watch, to run and hide; the fear and empire of man had passed away.
H. G. WellsIf we suppose a sufficient righteousness and intelligence in men to produce presently, from the tremendous lessons of history, an effective will for a world peace - that is to say, an effective will for a world law under a world government - for in no other fashion is a secure world peace conceivable - in what manner may we expect things to move towards this end? . . . It is an educational task, and its very essence is to bring to the minds of all men everywhere, as a necessary basis for world cooperation, a new telling and interpretation, a common interpretation, of history.
H. G. WellsCivilization is in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.
H. G. WellsIt is highly probable that the bulk of the Jew's ancestors 'never' lived in Palestine 'at all,' which witnesses the power of historical assertion over fact.
H. G. WellsLosing your way on a journey is unfortunate. But, losing your reason for the journey is a fate more cruel.
H. G. WellsIt is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble.
H. G. WellsWhen she was fifteen if you'd told her that when she was twenty she'd be going to bed with bald-headed men and liking it, she would have thought you very abstract.
H. G. WellsIn all the round world there is no meat. There used to be. But now we cannot stand the thought of slaughterhouses.
H. G. WellsThe true objection to slavery is not that it is unjust to the inferior but that it corrupts the superior.
H. G. WellsNow they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence began in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau - and for what? It was the wantonness that stirred me.
H. G. WellsI am for world-control of production and of trade and transport, for a world coinage, and the confederation of mankind. I am for the super-State.
H. G. WellsYou have only to play at Little Wars three or four times to realize just what a blundering thing Great War must be. Great War is at present, I am convinced, not only the most expensive game in the universe, but it is a game out of all proportion. Not only are the masses of men and material and suffering and inconvenience too monstrously big for reason, but-the available heads we have for it, are too small. That, I think, is the most pacific realization conceivable, and Little War brings you to it as nothing else but Great War can do.
H. G. WellsWe can't have any weak or silly. Life is real again, and the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die. They ought to die. They ought to be willing to die. It's a sort of disloyalty, after all, to live and taint the race.
H. G. Wells