H. G. Wells Quotes

Man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him.

It [a new world order] needs only that the governments of Britain, the United States, France, Germany, and Russia should get together in order to set up an effective control of currency, credit, production, and distribution – that is to say, an effective ‘dictatorship of prosperity,’ for the whole world. The other sixty odd States would have to join in or accommodate themselves to the over-ruling decisions of these major Powers.

The passion for playing chess is one of the most unaccountable in the world. It slaps the theory of natural selection in the face. It is the most absorbing of occupations. The least satisfying of desires. A nameless excrescence upon life. It annihilates a man. You have, let us say, a promising politician, a rising artist that you wish to destroy. Dagger or bomb are archaic and unreliable - but teach him, inoculate him with chess.

The world needs something stronger than any possible rebellion against its peace. In other words it needs a federal world government embodying a new conception of human life as one whole.

Sometimes, you have to step outside of the person you've been and remember the person you were meant to be. The person you want to be. The person you are.

We will peck them to death to-morrow, my dear.

There will be little drudgery in this better ordered world. Natural power harnessed in machines will be the general drudge. What drudgery is inevitable will be done as a service and duty for a few years or months out of each life; it will not consume nor degrade the whole life of anyone.

It is the system of nationalist individualism that has to go....We are living in the end of the sovereign states....In the great struggle to evoke a Westernized World Socialism, contemporary governments may vanish....Countless people...will hate the new world order....and will die protesting against it.

Go away... I'm alright.

The choice is: the Universe...or nothing.

The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts from the east, and the showering white flakes in the air increased in number. From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives - all that was over.

Satan delights equally in statistics and in quoting scripture.

The greatest task of democracy, its ritual and feast - is choice.

You have, let us say, a promising politician, a rising artist that you wish to destroy. Dagger or bomb are archaic, clumsy and unreliable - but teach him, inoculate him with chess.

The path of social advancement is, and must be, strewn with broken friendships.

When a man realizes his littleness, his greatness can appear.

A federation of all humanity, together with a sufficient measure of social justice, to ensure health, education, and a rough equality of opportunity to most of the children born into the world, would mean such a release and increase of human energy as to open a new phase in human history.

I came out for exercise, gentle exercise, and to notice the scenery and to botanise. And no sooner do I get on that accursed machine than off I go hammer and tongs; I never look to right or left, never notice a flower, never see a view - get hot, juicy, red - like a grilled chop. Get me on that machine and I have to go. I go scorching along the road, and cursing aloud at myself for doing it.

The crisis [the Great Depression] discovered a great man in Franklin Roosevelt...None too soon he has carried America forward to the second stage of democratic realization. His New Deal involves such collective controls of the national business that it would be absurd to call it anything but socialism, were it not for a prejudice lingering on from the old individualist days against that word...Both Roosevelt and Stalin were attempting to produce a huge, modern, scientifically organized, socialist state, the one out of a warning crisis and the other out of a chaos.

Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black looked at in the right light and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart.

The great body of physical science, a great deal of the essential fact of financial science, and endless social and political problems are only accessible and only thinkable to those who have had a sound training in mathematical analysis, and the time may not be very remote when it will be understood that for complete initiation as an efficient citizen of one of the new great complex worldwide States that are now developing, it is as necessary to be able to compute, to think in averages and maxima and minima, as it is now to be able to read and write.

This little upset across the water doesn't mean anything. Threatened men live long and threatened wars never occur.

Am I dreaming? Has the world gone mad--or have I?

The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities and businesses and economic relations, shook them also out of their old-established habits of thought, and out of the lightly held beliefs and prejudices that came down to them from the past.

Hunger makes a fool of a man.

If anything is possible, then nothing is interesting

Our true nationality is mankind.

We were making the future and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making. And here it is!

The professional military mind is by necessity an inferior and unimaginative mind; no man of high intellectual quality would willingly imprison his gifts in such a calling.

Money means in a thousand minds a thousand subtly different, roughly similar, systems of images, associations, suggestions and impulses.

In all ages, far back into prehistory, we find human beings have painted and adorned themselves.

You cannot imagine the craving for rest that I feel-a hunger and thirst. For six long days, since my work was done, my mind has been a whirlpool, swift, unprogressive and incessant, a torrent of thoughts leading nowhere, spinning round swift and steady.

I doubt if these two fine, active minds [President and Mrs. Roosevelt] have ever inquiried how it is they know what they know and think as they do. Nor have they ever thought of what they might have been if they had grown up in an entirely different culture. They have the disposition of all politicians world over to deal only with made opinion. They have never inquired how it is that opinion is made.

After telephone, kinematograph and phonograph had replaced newspaper, book schoolmaster and letter, to live outside the range of the electric cables was to live an isolated savage.

There is no remorse like a remorse of chess. It is a curse upon man. There is no happiness in chess.

It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have a huge variety of needs and dangers.

This is the end and the beginning of an age. This is something far greater than the French Revolution or the Reformation and we live in it.

I do not propose to add anything to what has already been written concerning the loss of the "Lady Vain."

What really matters is what you do with what you have.

We live in reference to past experience and not to future events, however inevitable.

The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow.

Are we all bubbles blown by a baby?

I don't think you fully appreciate the importance of Illusion in life, the Essential Nature of Lies and Deception of the body politic.

I don't suppose any man has ever understood any woman since the beginning of things. You don't understand our imaginations, how wild our imaginations can be.

The doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, which was the main teaching of Jesus, is certainly one of the most revolutionary doctrines that ever stirred and changed human thought.

If only I had thought of a Kodak! I could have flashed that glimpse of the Under-world in a second, and examined it at leisure.

The science hangs like a gathering fog in a valley, a fog which begins nowhere and goes nowhere, an incidental, unmeaning inconvenience to passers-by.

Countless people...will hate the New World Order...and will die protesting against it...we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents.