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H. G. Wells

H. G. Wells Quotes

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Famous H. G. Wells Quotes

“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.”

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Book:The Invisible Man
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“Perhaps I am a man of exceptional moods. I do not know how far my experience is common. At times I suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all. This feeling was very strong upon me that night. Here was another side to my dream.”

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Author:H. G. Wells
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“Well, I do not mind telling you I have been at work upon this geometry of Four Dimensions for some time. Some of my results are curious. For instance, here is a portrait of a man at eight years old, another atfifteen, another at seventeen, another at twenty-three, and so on. All these are evidently sections, as it were, Three-Dimensional representations of his Four-Dimensioned being, which is a fixed and unalterable thing.”

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Book:The Time Machine (Sparklesoup Classics)
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“If I am recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence; I become absent minded, as you say. I jump back for a moment. Of course we have no means of staying back for any length of time any more than a savage or an animal has of staying six feet above the ground. But a civilized man is better off than the savage in this respect. He can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should we not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time Dimension; or even to turn about and travel the other way?”

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Author:H. G. Wells
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“A priest is a man vowed, trained, and consecrated, a man belonging to a special corps, and necessarily with an intense esprit de corps. He has given up his life to his temple and his god. This is a very excellent thing for the internal vigour of his own priesthood, his own temple. He lives and dies for the honour of his particular god. But in the next town or village is another temple with another god. It is his constant preoccupation to keep his people from that god. Religious cults and priesthoods are sectarian by nature; they will convert, they will overcome, but they will never coalesce.”

PeopleMenReligionDiesNextGivenReligiousSpecialParticularOvercomingTownsConstantIntenseExcellentInternalsTemplesPriestsBelongingVillageHonourCultGiven UpPreoccupationPriesthoodEsprit De CorpsReligious Cults
Book:Delphi Collected Works of H. G. Wells (Illustrated)
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“Why had we come to the moon? The thing presented itself to me as a perplexing problem. What is this spirit in man that urges him for ever to depart from happiness and security, to toil, to place himself in danger, to risk an even a reasonable certainty of death? It dawned upon me that there in the moon as a thing I ought always to have known, that man is not made to go about safe and comfortable and well fed and amused. ... against his interest, against his happiness, he is constantly being driven to do unreasonable things. Some force not himself impels him, and he must go.”

MenWellsMadeProblemSpiritForceInterestKnownRiskSecurityDangerAdventureOughtMoonSafeComfortableDrivenCertaintyReasonableUrgesFedsToilUnreasonableAmusedCertainty Of Death
Book: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…
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“If 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.”

IfsMenFirstsReasonStoriesFallHouseParentSinAnimalChristianityEvolutionHistoricalCardsFabricEdenAtonementHouse Of Cards
Book: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…
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“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.”

MenWorldFacesDesireArtistPassionWishNaturalTeachTheoryPoliticianChessRisingBombsOccupationSatisfyingSelectionSlapNatural SelectionAbsorbingNamelessUnreliableDaggersPlaying Chess
Author:H. G. Wells
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“Rest enough for the individual man, too much and too soon, and we call it death. But for man, no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First this little planet and all its winds and ways, and then all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about him, and, at last, out across immensities to the stars. And when he has conquered all the deep space, and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning.”

MenWayMindFirstsLittlesStillsMatterEnoughLastsLawTimeIndividualStarsSpaceToo MuchMysteryPlanetsWindGoes OnIndividualityConquestImmensityMind And MatterDeep Space
Author:H. G. Wells
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“The world state must begin; it can only begin, as a propaganda cult, or as a group of propagandist cults, to which men and women must give themselves and their energies, regardless of the consequence to themselves The activities of a cult which sets itself to bring about the world-state would at first be propagandist, they would be intellectual and educational, and only as a sufficient mass of opinion and will had accumulated would they become to a predominant extent politically constructive. Such a cult must direct itself particularly to the teaching of the young.”

MenWorldGivingFirstsStatesWould BeYoungEnergyOpinionGroupsTeachingActivityMassIntellectualMen And WomenConsequenceDirectEducationalPropagandaSufficientCultConstructivePropagandist
Author:H. G. Wells
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“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.”

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Author:H. G. Wells
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“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?'”

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Book:The New World Order
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“So it was that the war in the air began. Men rode upon the whirlwind that night and slew and fell like archangels. The sky rained heroes upon the astonished earth. Surely the last fights of mankind were the best. What was the heavy pounding of your Homeric swordsmen, what was the creaking charge of chariots, besides this swift rush, this crash, this giddy triumph, this headlong sweep to death?”

MenWarEarthLastsNightFightingAirSkyMankindHeroHeavyTriumphAviationCombatCrashArchangelChariotsWhirlwindGiddySwordsman
Book:The World Set Free: H. G. Wells Collections
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“Even men who were engaged in organizing debt-serf cultivation and debt-serf industrialism in the American cotton districts, in the old rubber plantations, and in the factories of India, China, and South Italy, appeared as generous supporters of and subscribers to the sacred cause of individual liberty.”

MenPoliticalPoliticsIndividualCausesLibertyIndiaSacredSouthChinaDebtGenerousEngagedFactoriesSupporterCottonCultivationRubberIndividual LibertyPlantationsSerfs
Book:Shape Things Come
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“The British Islands are small islands and our people numerically a little people. Their only claim to world importance depends upon their courage and enterprise, and a people who will not stand up to the necessity of air service planned on a world scale, and taking over thousands of aeroplanes and thousands of men from the onset of peace, has no business to pretend anything more than a second rate position in the world. We cannot be both Imperial and mean.”

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Author:H. G. Wells
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“Men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise.”

MenMightScienceUniverseMysteryReadyWelcomeWar Of The WorldsEnterpriseMissionaryInferiorsMars
Book: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…
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“Indeed Christianity passes. Passes - it has gone! It has littered the beaches of life with churches, cathedrals, shrines and crucifixes, prejudices and intolerances, like the sea urchin and starfish and empty shells and lumps of stinging jelly upon the sands here after a tide. A tidal wave out of Egypt. And it has left a multitude of little wriggling theologians and confessors and apologists hopping and burrowing in the warm nutritious sand. But in the hearts of living men, what remains of it now? Doubtful scraps of Arianism. Phrases. Sentiments. Habits.”

MenHeartLittlesReligionLeftChurchChristianityGoneSeaHabitEmptyPrejudiceRemainsWaveWarmBeachPhrasesSandSentimentsTidesIntoleranceShellsMultitudesEgyptTheologianDoubtfulScrapCathedralsLumpsShrinesJellyHoppingTidal WavesStarfishEmpty ShellBurrowing
Author:H. G. Wells
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“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.”

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Author:H. G. Wells
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“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.”

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Book:Annotated War of the Worlds with English Grammar Exercises: by H.G. Wells (Author), Robert Powell (Editor)
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