H. G. Wells Quotes

307 Sourced Quotes

Since the passing of Victoria the Great there had been an accumulating uneasiness in the national life. It was as if some compact and dignified paper-weight had been lifted from people's ideas, and as if at once they had begun to blow about anyhow.

H. G. Wells
Science has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use. It is time she held her hand.

H. G. Wells
'Pippa' Passworthy: This little upset across the water doesn't mean anything. Threatened men live long and threatened wars never occur.

H. G. Wells
They haven't any spirit in them - no proud dreams and no proud lusts; and a man who hasn't one or the other-Lord! What is he but funk and precautions.

H. G. Wells
To do such a thing would be to transcend magic. And I beheld, unclouded by doubt, a magnificent vision of all that invisibility might mean to a man—the mystery, the power, the freedom. Drawbacks I saw none. You have only to think! And I, a shabby, poverty-struck, hemmed-in demonstrator, teaching fools in a provincial college, might suddenly become—this.

H. G. Wells
It seemed to me that all over the world intelligent people were waking up to the indignity and absurdity of being endangered, restrained, and impoverished, by a mere uncritical adhesion to traditional governments, traditional ideas of economic life, and traditional forms of behaviour, and that these awaking intelligent people must constitute first a protest and then a creative resistance to the inertia that was stifling and threatening us. These people I imagined would say first, "We are drifting; we are doing nothing worth while with our lives. Our lives are dull and stupid and not good enough."

H. G. Wells
"By Heaven, Kemp, you don't know what rage is! To have worked for years, to have planned and plotted, and then to get some fumbling purblind idiot messing across your course! Every conceivable sort of silly creature that has ever been created has been sent to cross me. "If I have much more of it, I shall go wild—I shall start mowing 'em. "As it is, they've made things a thousand times more difficult." "No doubt it's exasperating," said Kemp, dryly.

H. G. Wells
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.

H. G. Wells
I am not deeply versed in physical science, but there are certain things about water that fill me with wonder and amaze.

H. G. Wells
"Why!" said Huxter, suddenly, "that's not a man at all. It's just empty clothes. Look! You can see down his collar and the linings of his clothes. I could put my arm—" He extended his hand; it seemed to meet something in mid-air, and he drew it back with a sharp exclamation. "I wish you'd keep your fingers out of my eye," said the aerial voice, in a tone of savage expostulation. "The fact is, I'm all here: head, hands, legs, and all the rest of it, but it happens I'm invisible. It's a confounded nuisance, but I am. That's no reason why I should be poked to pieces by every stupid bumpkin in Iping, is it?"

H. G. Wells
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.

H. G. Wells
In all the round world of Utopia there is no meat. There used to be. But now we cannot stand the thought of slaughter-houses. And, in a population that is all educated, and at about the same level of physical refinement, it is practically impossible to find anyone who will hew a dead ox or pig. We never settled the hygienic question of meat-eating at all. This other aspect decided us. I can still remember, as a boy, the rejoicings over the closing of the last slaughter-house.

H. G. Wells
The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is or has been is but the twilight of the dawn.

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

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

H. G. Wells
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.

H. G. Wells
We are always getting away from the present moment. Our mental existence, which are immaterial and have no dimensions, are passing along the Time-Dimension with a uniform velocity from the cradle to the grave.

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

H. G. Wells
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.

H. G. Wells
We have learned now that we cannot regard this planet as being fenced in and a secure abiding place for Man we can never anticipate the unseen good or evil that may come upon us suddenly out of space.

H. G. Wells
I believe that the crazy combative patriotism that plainly threatens to destroy civilisation today is very largely begotten by the schoolmaster and the schoolmistress in their history lessons. They take the growing mind at a naturally barbaric phase and they inflame and fix its barbarism.

H. G. Wells
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.

H. G. Wells
The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with amazing amazing subtlety — their mathematical learning is evidently far in excess of ours.

H. G. Wells
Raymond Passworthy: But... we're such little creatures. Poor humanity's so fragile, so weak. Little... little animals.

H. G. Wells
They may fight against greatness in us who are the children of men, but can they conquer? Even if they should destroy us every one, what then? Would it save them? No! For greatness is abroad, not only in us, not only in the Food, but in the purpose of all things! It is in the nature of all things, it is part of space and time. To grow and still to grow, from first to last that is Being, that is the law of life. What other law can there be?

H. G. Wells