“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.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of H. G. Wells (Illustrated)
“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.”
“It is the going out from oneself that is love and not the accident of its return. It is the expedition, whether it fail or succeed.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of H. G. Wells
“If your life doesn't end in failure, you haven't reached high enough. So it was failure I had to achieve.”
“The Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie to and humbug themselves for the general Good. Lies are the mortar that bind the savage individual man into the social masonry.”
“If we do not end war - war will end us. Everybody says that, millions of people believe it, and nobody does anything.”
“You are trying to do a more difficult thing than record folk songs; you are trying to record life.”
“This blessed gift of smoking!”
Source: The Invisible Man: H. G. Wells Collections
“Everywhere in the world there are ignorance and prejudice, but the greatest complex of these, with the most extensive prestige and the most intimate entanglement with traditional institutions, is the Roman Catholic Church.”
Source: Crux Ansata: An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church
“The man who raises a fist has run out of ideas.”
“The ethical system of these men of the New Republic, the ethical system which will dominate the world state, will be shaped primarily to favour the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity — beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds, and a growing body of knowledge — and to check the procreation of base and servile types, of fear-driven and cowardly souls, of all that is mean and ugly and bestial in the souls, bodies, or habits of men.”
“The Athenian democracy suffered much from that narrowness of patriotism which is the ruin of all nations.”
Source: The Outline of History: Prehistory to the Roman Republic
“A biography should be a dissection and demonstration of how a particular human being was made and worked.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of H. G. Wells
“A time will come when men will sit with history before them or with some old newspaper before them and ask incredulously,"Was there ever such a world?"”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of H. G. Wells
“About two-thirds of the face of Marx is beard, a vast solemn wooly uneventful beard that must have made all normal exercise impossible. It is not the sort of beard that happens to a man, it is a beard cultivated, cherished, and thrust patriarchally upon the world.”
Source: H. G. WELLS Ultimate Collection: 120+ Science Fiction Classics, Novels & Stories; Including Scientific, Political and Historical Works: The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, Modern Utopia, A Short History of the World, What Is Coming, The Story of the Last Trump…
“Every one of these hundreds of millions of human beings is in some form seeking happiness.... Not one is altogether noble nor altogether trustworthy nor altogether consistent; and not one is altogether vile.... Not a single one but has at some time wept.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of H. G. Wells (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: H. G. WELLS Ultimate Collection: 120+ Science Fiction Classics, Novels & Stories; Including Scientific, Political and Historical Works: The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, Modern Utopia, A Short History of the World, What Is Coming, The Story of the Last Trump…
“I am prepared to maintain that Honesty is essentially an anarchistic and disintegrating force in society, that communities are held together and the progress of civilization made possible only by vigorous and sometimes even, violent Lying; that the Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie and humbug themselves and one another for the general Good.”
“I don't think you fully appreciate the importance of Illusion in life, the Essential Nature of Lies and Deception of the body politic.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of H. G. Wells (Illustrated)
“I was never a great amorist, though I have loved several people very deeply.”
Source: The Wonderful Visit
“If Max [Aitken] gets to Heaven he won't last long. He will be chucked out for trying to pull off a merger between Heaven and Hell ... after having secured a controlling interest in key subsidiary companies in both places, of course.”
“If you do not want to explore an egoism you should not read autobiography.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of H. G. Wells
“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.”
Source: The Soul of a Bishop
“Success is to be measured not by wealth, power, or fame, but by the ratio between what a man is and what he might be.”
“The brain upon which my experiences have been written is not a particularly good one. If their were brain-shows, as there are cat and dog shows, I doubt if it would get even a third class prize.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of H. G. Wells
“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.”
Source: H. G. WELLS Ultimate Collection: 120+ Science Fiction Classics, Novels & Stories; Including Scientific, Political and Historical Works: The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, Modern Utopia, A Short History of the World, What Is Coming, The Story of the Last Trump…
“The third peculiarity of aerial warfare was that it was at once enormously destructive and entirely indecisive.”
Source: H. G. WELLS Ultimate Collection: 120+ Science Fiction Classics, Novels & Stories; Including Scientific, Political and Historical Works: The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, Modern Utopia, A Short History of the World, What Is Coming, The Story of the Last Trump…
“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.”
Source: H. G. Wells The Dover Reader
“The true objection to slavery is not that it is unjust to the inferior but that it corrupts the superior.”
Source: H. G. WELLS Ultimate Collection: 120+ Science Fiction Classics, Novels & Stories; Including Scientific, Political and Historical Works: The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, Modern Utopia, A Short History of the World, What Is Coming, The Story of the Last Trump…
“The 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.”
Source: The Outline of History: The Roman Empire to the Great War
“We were making the future and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making. And here it is!”
Source: H. G. WELLS Ultimate Collection: 120+ Science Fiction Classics, Novels & Stories; Including Scientific, Political and Historical Works: The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, Modern Utopia, A Short History of the World, What Is Coming, The Story of the Last Trump…
“What good is religion if it collapses under calamity?”
Source: The War of the Worlds
“The fertilising conflict of individualities is the ultimate meaning of the personal life.”
Source: H. G. WELLS Ultimate Collection: 120+ Science Fiction Classics, Novels & Stories; Including Scientific, Political and Historical Works: The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, Modern Utopia, A Short History of the World, What Is Coming, The Story of the Last Trump…
“Let us get together with other people of our sort and make over the world into a great world-civilization that will enable us to realize the promises and avoid the dangers of this new time.”
Source: The Open Conspiracy: What are We to Do with Our Lives? : Blue Prints for a World Revolution
“There is space in its philosophy for everyone which is one reason why India is a home to every single religion in the world.”
“Hinduism is synonymous with humanism. That is its essence and its great liberating quality.”
“We must end war before war ends us.”
“Money means in a thousand minds a thousand subtly different, roughly similar, systems of images, associations, suggestions and impulses.”
“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.”
“Nothing remains interesting where anything may happen.”
“The history of mankind for the last four centuries is rather like that of an imprisoned sleeper, stirring clumsily and uneasily while the prison that restrains and shelters him catches fire, not waking but incorporating the crackling and warmth of the fire with ancient and incongruous dreams, than like that of a man consciously awake to danger and opportunity.”
Source: A Short History of the World
“Science 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.”
Source: The Island of Doctor Moreau
“Everyone leaves the world a little better some by leaving.”
“[A novel by Henry James] is like a church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently place, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string.”
“I often think we do not take this business of photography in a sufficiently serious spirit. Issuing a photograph is like marriage: you can only undo the mischief with infinite woe.”
Source: Select Conversations with an Uncle (Now Extinct) and Two Other Reminiscences
“I do not propose to add anything to what has already been written concerning the loss of the "Lady Vain."”
Source: The Island of Dr. Moreau
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of H. G. Wells
“You Americans have the loveliest wine in the world, you know, but you don't realize it. You call them domestic and that's enough to start trouble anywhere.”
“When 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.”
Source: H. G. WELLS Ultimate Collection: 120+ Science Fiction Classics, Novels & Stories; Including Scientific, Political and Historical Works: The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, Modern Utopia, A Short History of the World, What Is Coming, The Story of the Last Trump…
“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.”
