H.G.Wells Quotes

Their bodies lay flatly on the rocks, and their eyes regarded him with evil interest: but it does not appear that Mr. Fison was afraid, or that he realized that he was in any danger. Possibly his confidence is to be ascribed to the limpness of their attitudes. But he was horrified, of course, and intensely excited and indignant at such revolting creatures preying upon human flesh. He thought they had chanced upon a drowned body. He shouted to them, with the idea of driving them off, and, finding they did not budge, cast about him, picked up a big rounded lump of rock, and flung it at one.And then, slowly uncoiling their tentacles, they all began moving towards him - creeping at first deliberately, and making a soft purring sound to each other.
H.G.Wells
Nowhere in the world, Rud reflected, was journalism anything but a malignant and wanton power. Later on, as the Common-sense Movement grew, he had to think a lot about that. He had to spread a new system of ideas throughout the world, and journalism would neither instruct nor inform nor lend itself consistently to any sustained propaganda.
H.G.Wells
I want to go ahead of Father Time with a scythe of my own.
H.G.Wells
The past is but the beginning of a beginning and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.
H.G.Wells
The future is the shape of things to come.
H.G.Wells
He had read Shakespeare and found him weak in chemistry.
H.G.Wells
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.
H.G.Wells
Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of organized life.
H.G.Wells
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.
H.G.Wells
Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of organized life.
H.G.Wells
Moral indignation - jealousy with a halo.
H.G.Wells
Our true nationality is mankind.
H.G.Wells
To be honest one must be inconsistent.
H.G.Wells
Human history is in essence a history of ideas.
H.G.Wells
The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow.
H.G.Wells
Cynicism is humour in ill health.
H.G.Wells
Advertising is legalized lying.
H.G.Wells
Adapt or perish now as ever is nature's inexorable imperative.
H.G.Wells
Before, they had been beasts, their instincts fitly adapted to their surroundings, and happy as living things may be. 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, begun in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau- and for what? It was the wantonness of it that stirred me.
H.G.Wells
What, unless biological science is a mass of errors, is the cause of human intelligence and vigour? Hardship and freedom: conditions under which the active, strong, and subtle survive and the weaker go to the wall; conditions that put a premium upon the loyal alliance of capable men, upon self-restraint, patience, and decision. And the institution of the family, and the emotions that arise therein, the fierce jealousy, the tenderness for offspring, parental self-devotion, all found their justification and support in the imminent dangers of the young.
H.G.Wells
We do our job and go. See? That is what Death is for. We work out all our little brains and all our little emotions, and then this lot begins afresh. Fresh and fresh! Perfectly simple. What's the trouble?
H.G.Wells
Nobody read books, but women, parsons and idle people.
H.G.Wells
In times of long established peace, when the tradition of generations has established the illusion of the profoundest human security, men's minds are not greatly distressed by grotesqueness and absurdity in their political forms. It is all part of the humour and the good-humour of life. When one believes that all the tigers in the jungle are dead, it is quite amusing to walk along the jungle paths in a dressing-gown with a fan instead of a gun.
H.G.Wells
And in friendship and still more here, in this central business of love, accident rules it seems to me almost altogether. What personalities you will encounter in life, and have for a chief interest in life, is nearly as much a matter of chance as the drift of a grain of pollen in the pine forest. And once the light hazard has blown it has blown, never to drive again.
H.G.Wells
I had not, I said to myself, come into the future to carry on a miniature flirtation.
H.G.Wells
In another place was a vast array of idols—Polynesian, Mexican, Grecian, Phoenician, every country on earth I should think. And here, yielding to an irresistible impulse, I wrote my name upon the nose of a steatite monster from South America that particularly took my fancy.
H.G.Wells
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.
H.G.Wells
He began to realize that you cannot even fight happily with creatures that stand upon a different mental basis to yourself.
H.G.Wells
To Europe she was America. To America she was the gateway to the earth. But to tell the story of New York would be to write a social history of the world.
H.G.Wells
The new mathematics is a sort of supplement to language, affording a means of thought about form and quantity and a means of expression,more exact,compact, and ready than ordinary language. The great body of physical science, a great deal of the essential facts of financial science, and endless social and political problems are only accessible and 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 world wide 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.
H.G.Wells
And the great difference between man and monkey is in the larynx.
H.G.Wells
If it were not for collectors England would be full, so to speak, of rare birds and wonderful butterflies, strange flowers and a thousand interesting things. But happily the collector prevents all that, either killing with his own hands or, by buying extravagantly, procuring people of the lower classes to kill such eccentricities as appear. ...Eccentricity, in fact, is immorality--think over it again if you do not think so now--just as eccentricity in one's way of thinking is madness (I defy you to find another definition that will fit all the cases of either); and if a species is rare it follows that it is not Fitted to Survive. The collector is after all merely like the foot soldier in the days of heavy armour-he leaves the combatants alone and cuts the throats of those who are overthrown. So one may go through England from end to end in the summer time and see only eight or ten commonplace wild flowers, and the commoner butterflies, and a dozen or so common birds, and never be offended by any breach of the monotony.
H.G.Wells
There's truths you have to grow into.
H.G.Wells
The uglier a man's legs are, the better he plays golf. It's almost a law.
H.G.Wells
You see," I said, "I'm a socialist. I don't think this world was made for a small minority to dance on the faces of everyone else.
H.G.Wells
You've made a beast of yourself,- to the beasts you may go.
H.G.Wells
Civilization is a race between disaster and education.
H.G.Wells
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.
H.G.Wells
Modern war, modern international hostility is, I believe, possible only through the stupid illiteracy of the mass of men and the conceit and intellectual indolence of rulers and those who feed the public mind.
H.G.Wells
A shell in the pit," said I, "if the worst comes to worst will kill them all."The intense excitement of the events had no doubt left my perceptive powers in a state of erethism. I remember that dinner table with extraordinary vividness even now. My dear wife's sweet anxious face peering at me from under the pink lampshade, the white cloth with it silver and glass table furniture—for in those days even philosophical writers had luxuries—the crimson-purple wine in my glass, are photographically distinct. At the end of it I sat, tempering nuts with a cigarette, regretting Ogilvy's rashness, and denouncing the shortsighted timidity of the Martians.So some respectable dodo in the Mauritius might have lorded it in his nest, and discussed the arrival of that shipful of pitiless sailors in want of animal food. "We will peck them to death tomorrow, my dear.
H.G.Wells
An idiot child screaming in a hospital." (on George Bernard Shaw)
H.G.Wells
One may picture, too, the sudden shifting of the attention, the swiftly spreading coils and bellyings of that blackness advancing headlong, towering heavenward, turning the twilight to a palpable darkness, a strange and horrible antagonist of vapour striding upon its victims, men and horses near it seen dimly, running, shrieking, falling headlong, shouts of dismay, the guns suddenly abandoned, men choking and writhing on the ground, and the swift broadening-out of the opaque cone of smoke. And then night and extinction – nothing but a silent mass of impenetrable vapour hiding its dead.
H.G.Wells
And there it was, on a shabby bed in a tawdry, ill-lighted bedroom, surrounded by a crowd of ignorant and excited people, broken and wounded, betrayed and unpitied, that Griffin, the first of all men to make himself invisible, Griffin, the most gifted physicist the world has ever seen, ended in infinite disaster his strange and terrible career.
H.G.Wells
He has made the cat his own. He invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world. English cats that do not look and live like Louis Wain cats are ashamed of themselves.
H.G.Wells
The fertilising conflict of individualities is the ultimate meaning of the personal life.
H.G.Wells
I suppose a suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder at what will come next as I felt then.
H.G.Wells
He blinked at the sun and dreamt that perhaps he might snare it and spare it as it went down to its resting place amidst the distant hills.
H.G.Wells
This has ever been the fate of energy in security; it takes to art and to eroticism, and then comes languor and decay.
H.G.Wells
Kemp: I demonstrated conclusively this morning that invisibility--I.M: Never mind what YOU'VE DEMONSTRATED!--I'm starving, said the voice, and the night is--chilly for a man without clothes.
H.G.Wells
Within he felt that faint stirring of derision for the whole business of life which is the salt of the American mentality. Outwardly they are sentimental and enthusiastic and inwardly they are profoundly cynical.
H.G.Wells
The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well enough. Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness of rotting paper testified.
H.G.Wells
In the next place, wonderful as it seems in a sexual world, the Martians were absolutely without sex, and therefore without any of the tumultuous emotions that arise...
H.G.Wells
The peaceful splendour of the night healed again. The moon was now past the meridian and travelling down the west. It was at its full, and very bright, riding through the empty blue sky.
H.G.Wells
But I was too restless to watch long; I'm too Occidental for a long vigil. I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours -- that's another matter.
H.G.Wells
But, as I say, I was toofull of excitement and (a true saying, though those who have neverknown danger may doubt it) too desperate to die.
H.G.Wells
By this time I was nolonger very much terrified or very miserable. I had, as it were, passed thelimit of terror and despair. I felt now that my life was practically lost,and that persuasion made me capable of daring anything
H.G.Wells
It's just men and ants. There's the ants builds their cities,live their lives, have wars, revolutions, until men want them out of the way, and then they go out of the way. That's what we are now _ just ants.
H.G.Wells
But giving drugs to a cat is no joke, Kemp!
H.G.Wells
I do not know if hell is hot or cold, or what sort of place hell may be, but this I surely know, that if there is any hell at all it will be badly lit. And it will taste like a train.
H.G.Wells
For that moment I touched an emotion beyond the common range of men, yet one the poor brutes we dominate know only too well. I felt as a rabbit might feel returning to his burrow, and suddenly confronted by the work of a dozen busy navvies digging the foundations of a house. I felt the first inkling of a thing that presently grew quite clear in my mind, that oppressed me for many days, a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer master, but an animal among animals; under the Martian heel.
H.G.Wells