H. G. Wells Quotations

Our true nationality is mankind.

The uglier a man's legs are, the better he plays golf - it's almost a law.

It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not pay with their own.

Human history in essence is the history of ideas.

If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.

A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own.

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.

The New Deal is plainly an attempt to achieve a working socialism and avert a social collapse in America; it is extraordinarily parallel to the successive 'policies' and 'Plans' of the Russian experiment. Americans shirk the word 'socialism', but what else can one call it?

There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection.

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.

Affliction comes to us, not to make us sad but sober; not to make us sorry but wise.

Beauty is in the heart of the beholder.

The past is the beginning of the beginning and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

If we don't end war, war will end us.

While 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.

Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State's failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community.

The past is but the past of a beginning.

I want to go ahead of Father Time with a scythe of my own.

Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.

The path of least resistance is the path of the loser.

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.

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

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

Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.

Some people bear three kinds of trouble - the ones they've had, the ones they have, and the ones they expect to have.

I must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea.

History is a race between education and catastrophe.

In politics, strangely enough, the best way to play your cards is to lay them face upwards on the table.

We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century - for several centuries.

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.

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

Heresies are experiments in man's unsatisfied search for truth.

The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow.

After people have repeated a phrase a great number of times, they begin to realize it has meaning and may even be true.

There's nothing wrong in suffering, if you suffer for a purpose. Our revolution didn't abolish danger or death. It simply made danger and death worthwhile.

Sailors ought never to go to church. They ought to go to hell, where it is much more comfortable.

I had rather be called a journalist than an artist.

Once the command of the air is obtained by one of the contending armies, the war becomes a conflict between a seeing host and one that is blind.

One of the darkest evils of our world is surely the unteachable wildness of the Good.

Biologically the species is the accumulation of the experiments of all its successful individuals since the beginning.

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.

A downtrodden class... will never be able to make an effective protest until it achieves solidarity.

We must not allow the clock and the calendar to blind us to the fact that each moment of life is a miracle and mystery.

We all have our time machines, don't we. Those that take us back are memories...And those that carry us forward, are dreams.

The true objection to slavery is not that it is unjust to the inferior but that it corrupts the superior.

The man who raises a fist has run out of ideas.

Christ is the most unique person of history. No man can write a history of the human race without giving first and foremost place to the penniless Teacher of Nazareth.

There 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.

Let your love be stronger than your hate or anger. Learn the wisdom of compromise, for it is better to bend a little than to break.

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.

Until a man has found God, he begins at no beginning and works to no end.

If there is no God, nothing matters. If there is a God, nothing else matters.

Biologists can be just as sensitive to heresy as theologians.

Advertising is legalized lying.

There is no more evil thing in this world than race prejudice, none at all. [...] It justifies and holds together more baseness, cruelty, and abomination than any other sort of error in the world.

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

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.

Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change.

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

Find 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

Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe swims.

The new century will see changes that will dwarf those of the last.

The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.

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

once you lose yourself, you have two choices: find the person you used to be, or lose that person completely.

Now 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.

Armament 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?'

Good books are the warehouses of ideas.

The true strength of rulers and empires lies not in armies or emotions, but in the belief of men that they are inflexibly open and truthful and legal. As soon as a government departs from that standard it ceases to be anything more than 'the gang in possession,' and its days are numbered.

In all the round world of Utopia there is no meat. There used to be, but now we cannot stand the thought of slaughterhouses. And it is impossible to find anyone who will hew a dead ox or pig. I can still remember as a boy the rejoicings over the closing of the last slaughterhouse.

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

The Islamic teachings have left great traditions for equitable and gentle dealings and behavior, and inspire people with nobility and tolerance. These are human teachings of the highest order and at the same time practicable. These teachings brought into existence a society in which hard-heartedness and collective oppression and injustice were the least as compared with all other societies preceding it....Islam is replete with gentleness, courtesy, and fraternity.

To ride a bicycle properly is very like a love affair-chiefly it is a matter of faith. Believe you do it, and the thing is done; doubt, and, for the life of you, you cannot.

I hope, or I could not live.

The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the pain in the world had found a voice

Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write!

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

Is it any wonder that to this day this Galilean is too much for our small hearts?

No 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.

If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn't expecting it.

I am an historian, I am not a believer, but I must confess as a historian that this penniless preacher from Nazareth is irrevocably the very center of history. Jesus Christ is easily the most dominant figure in all history.

I write as straight as I can, just as I walk as straight as I can, because that is the best way to get there.

You 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.

Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future.

And 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 ...

All men, however highly educated, retain some superstitious inklings.

He began to realize that you cannot even fight happily with creatures that stand upon a different mental basis to yourself.

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?

One believes in Stephen Dedalus as one believes in few characters in fiction.

Man ... 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.

My days I devote to reading and experiments in chemistry, and I spend many of the clear nights in the study of astronomy. 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. There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope.

Endless conflicts. Endless misunderstanding. All life is that. Great and little cannot understand one another.

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.

Human history is, in essence, a history of ideas.

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

I had just taken to reading. I had just discovered the art of leaving my body to sit impassive in a crumpled up attitude in a chair or sofa, while I wandered over the hills and far away in novel company and new scenes... My world began to expand very rapidly,... the reading habit had got me securely.

Life, forever dying to be born afresh, forever young and eager, will presently stand upon this Earth as upon a footstool, and stretch out its realm amidst the stars.

There was a time when I believed in the story and the scheme of salvation, so far as I could understand it, just as I believed there was a Devil... Suddenly the light broke through to me and I knew this God was a lie... For indeed it is a silly story, and each generation nowadays swallows it with greater difficulty... Why do people go on pretending about this Christianity?