H.G.Wells Quotes & Sayings

Countless people ... will hate the New World Order ... and will die protesting against it ... we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents ... — H.G.Wells

Eight-and-twenty years,' said I, 'I have lived, and never a ghost have I seen as yet.'
The old woman sat staring hard into the fire, her pale eyes wide open.
'Ay,' she broke in; 'and eight-and-twenty years you have lived and never seen the likes of this house, I reckon. There's a many things to see, when one's still but eight-and-twenty.' She swayed her head slowly from side to side. 'A many things to see and sorrow for.' ("The Red Room") — H.G.Wells

What good would the moon be to men? Even of their own planet what have they made but a battleground and theatre of infinite folly? Small as his world is, and short as his time, he has still in his little life down there far more than he can do. — H.G.Wells

You may kill me, but I can hold you - and all the universe for that matter - in the grip of this small brain. I would not change. Even now — H.G.Wells

Mendham was a cadaverous man with a magnificent beard. He looked,indeed, as if he had run to beard as a mustard plant runs to seed. But when he spoke you found he had a voice as well. — H.G.Wells

It came to me then, I am sure, for the first time, how promiscuous, how higgledy-piggledy was the whole of that jumble of mines and homes, collieries and potbanks, railway yards, canals, schools, forges and blast furnaces, churches, chapels, allotment hovels, a vast irregular agglomeration of ugly smoking accidents in which men lived as happy as frogs in a dustbin. Each thing jostled and damaged the other things about it, each thing ignored the other things about it; the smoke of the furnace defiled the potbank clay, the clatter of the railway deafened the worshipers in church, the public-house thrust corruption at the school doors, the dismal homes squeezed miserably amidst the monstrosities of industrialism, with an effect of groping imbecility. Humanity choked amidst its products, and all its energy went in increasing its disorder, like a blind stricken thing that struggles and sinks in a morass. — H.G.Wells

I want to go ahead of Father Time with a scythe of my own. — H.G.Wells

The third peculiarity of aerial warfare was that it was at once enormously destructive and entirely indecisive. — H.G.Wells

Religions are such stuff as dreams are made of. — H.G.Wells

The art of ignoring is one of the accomplishments of every well-bred girl, so carefully instilled that at last she can even ignore her own thoughts and her own knowledge. — H.G.Wells

The Jews looked for a special savior, a messiah, who was to redeem mankind by the agreeable process of restoring the fabulous glories of David and Solomon, and bringing the whole world at last under the firm but benevolent Jewish heel. — H.G.Wells

There comes a moment in the day when you have written your pages in the morning, attended to your correspondence in the afternoon, and have nothing further to do. Then comes that hour when you are bored; that's the time for sex. — H.G.Wells

And the great difference between man and monkey is in the larynx, he said, in the incapacity to frame delicately different sounding symbols by which thought could be sustained — H.G.Wells

The man was running away with the rest, and selling his papers for a shilling each as he ran - a grotesque mingling of profit and panic. — H.G.Wells

Don't you think you would attract attention?' said the Medical Man. 'Our ancestors had no great tolerance for anachronisms. — H.G.Wells

Then very haltingly at first, but afterwards more easily, he began to tell of the thing that was hidden in his life, the haunting memory of a beauty and a happiness that filled his heart with insatiable longings, that made all the interests and spectacle of worldly life seem dull and tedious and vain to him. — H.G.Wells

The teacher, whether mother, priest, or schoolmaster, is the real maker of history. — H.G.Wells

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

Hunger makes a fool of a man. — 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. — H.G.Wells

The day of democracy is past," he said. "Past for ever. That day began with the bowmen of Crecy, it ended when marching infantry, when common men in masses ceased to win the battles of the world, when costly cannon, great ironclads, and strategic railways became the means of power. To-day is the day of wealth. Wealth now is power as it never was power before - it commands earth and sea and sky. All power is for those who can handle wealth ... — H.G.Wells

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. — H.G.Wells

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. — H.G.Wells

Every time Europe looks across the Atlantic to see the American Eagle, it observes only the rear end of an ostrich. — H.G.Wells

We are to turn our backs for a space upon the insistent examination of the thing that is, and face towards the freer air, the ampler spaces of the thing that perhaps might be. — 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

Our true nationality is mankind. — H.G.Wells

A boy is a creature of odd feelings. — H.G.Wells

I wonder," said Graham.
Ostrog stared.
Must the world go this way?" said Graham, with his emotions at the speaking point. "Must it indeed
go in this way? Have all our hopes been vain?"
What do you mean?" said Ostrog. "Hopes?"
I came from a democratic age. And I find an aristocratic tyranny!"
Well, - but you are the chief tyrant."
Graham shook his head. — H.G.Wells

There seems to be no limit to the lies that honest but stupid disciples will tell for the glory of their master and for what they regard as the success of their propaganda. Men who would scorn to tell a lie in everyday life will become unscrupulous cheats and liars when they have given themselves up to propagandist work; it is one of the perplexing absurdities of our human nature. — H.G.Wells

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

The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us. — H.G.Wells

Where there is no derision the people perish," said Chiffan.

"Now who said that?" asked Steenhold, always anxious to check his quotations. "It sounds familiar."

"I said it," said Chiffan. "Get on with your suggestions. — H.G.Wells

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. — H.G.Wells

It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment. — H.G.Wells

But the Time Traveller had more than a touch of whim among his elements, and we distrusted him. — H.G.Wells

With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. — H.G.Wells

Down the mountain we shall go and down the passes, and as the valleys open the world will open, Utopia, where men and women are happy and laws are wise, and where all that is tangled and confused in human affairs has been unravelled and made right. — H.G.Wells

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. — H.G.Wells

The new century will see changes that will dwarf those of the last. — H.G.Wells

The chances of anything man-like on Mars are a million to one — H.G.Wells

All men, however highly educated, retain some superstitious inklings. — H.G.Wells

Suddenly, like a thing falling upon me from without, came fear. — H.G.Wells

We have done much in the last few years to destroy the severe limitations of Victorian delicacy, and all of us, from princesses and prime-ministers' wives downward, talk of topics that would have been considered quite gravely improper in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, some topics have, if anything, become more indelicate than they were, and this is especially true of the discussion of income, of any discussion that tends, however remotely, to inquire, Who is it at the base of everything who really pays in blood and muscle and involuntary submissions for your freedom and magnificence? This, indeed, is almost the ultimate surviving indecency. — H.G.Wells

An unpleasant odour would not be objected to, it is not objected to now in many continental hotels. — H.G.Wells

There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. — H.G.Wells

A world revolution to a higher social order, a world order, or utter downfall lies before us all. — H.G.Wells

Very much indeed of what we call moral education is such an artificial modification and perversion of instinct; pugnacity is trained into courageous self-sacrifice, and suppressed sexuality into religious emotion. — H.G.Wells

Now the most comprehensive conception of this new world is of one politically, socially and economically united To this end a small but increasing body of people in the world set their faces and seek to direct their lives. — H.G.Wells

I went to a box room at the top of the house and locked myself in, in order to be alone with my aching miseries. — H.G.Wells

This World Youth movement claims to represent and affect the politico-social activities of a grand total of forty million adherents - under the age of thirty ... It may play an important and increasing role in the consolidation of a new world order. — H.G.Wells

Affliction comes to us, not to make us sad but sober; not to make us sorry but wise. — H.G.Wells

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

Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of the organized life. — H.G.Wells

It is really in the end a far more humane proceeding than our earthly method of leaving children to grow into human beings, and then making machines of them. — H.G.Wells

I can best express my state of mind by saying that I wanted to be in at the death. — H.G.Wells

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. — H.G.Wells

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. — H.G.Wells

Me was the glittering desolation of the sea, the awful solitude upon which I had already suffered so much; behind me the island, hushed under the dawn, its Beast People silent and unseen. The enclosure, with all its provisions and ammunition, burnt noisily, with sudden gusts of flame, a fitful crackling, and now and then a crash. The heavy smoke drove up the beach away from me, rolling low over the distant tree-tops towards the huts in the ravine. Beside me were the charred vestiges of the boats and these four dead bodies. — H.G.Wells

There are men on that Commission who would steal the brakes off a mountain railway just before they went down in it...It's a struggle with suicidal imbeciles.

The Secret Places of The Heart (Kindle Location 59) — H.G.Wells

A large number of houses deserve to be burnt, most modern furniture, an overwhelming majority of pictures and books - one might go on for some time with the list. If our community was collectively anything more than a feeble idiot, it would burn most of London and Chicago, for example, an build sane and beautiful cities in the place of these pestilential heaps of private property. — H.G.Wells

I saw a gray-haired man a figure of hale age, sitting at a desk and writing. — H.G.Wells

That won't do," said the policeman; "that's murder." "I know what country I'm in," said the man with the beard. "I'm going to let off at his legs. Draw the bolts. — H.G.Wells

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 lit 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.'The Rediscovery of the Unique' Fortnightly Review (1891) — H.G.Wells

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP — H.G.Wells

In the middle years of the nineteenth century there first became abundant in this strange world of ours a class of men, men tending for the most part to become elderly, who are called, and who are very properly called, but who dislike extremely to be called
Scientists. — H.G.Wells

But I know it was a dull white, and had strange large greyish-red eyes; also that there was flaxen hair on its head and down its back. — H.G.Wells

No man goes out upon a novel expedition without misgivings.

The Secret Places of The Heart (Kindle Loc 245) — H.G.Wells

This sense of insecurity was falling about the entire planet and though people went on doing the things they usually did, they had none of the assurance, the happy-go-lucky "all-right" feeling, that had hitherto sustained normal men. They went on doing their customary things because they could not think of anything else to do. They tried to believe, and many did succeed in believing, that there would presently be a turn for the better. They did nothing to bring about that turn for the better; they just hoped it would occur. — H.G.Wells

I write to cover a frame of ideas. — H.G.Wells

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

Endless conflicts. Endless misunderstanding. All life is that. Great and little cannot understand one another. — H.G.Wells

A biography should be a dissection and demonstration of how a particular human being was made and worked. — H.G.Wells

The professional military mind is by necessity an inferior and unimaginative mind; no man of high intellectual quality would willingly imprison his gifts in such a calling. — H.G.Wells

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. — H.G.Wells

Losing your way on a journey is unfortunate. But, losing your reason for the journey is a fate more cruel. — 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

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. — H.G.Wells

Mankind which began in a cave and behind a windbreak will end in the disease-soaked ruins of a slum. — 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

I stood staring, not as yet realising that this was death leaping from man to man in that little distant crowd. — 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

And you cannot move at all in Time, you cannot get away from the present moment. — 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

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. — 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

Why are these things permitted? What sins have we done? The morning service was over, I was walking through the roads to clear my brain for the afternoon, and then - fire, earthquake, death! As if it were Sodom and Gomorrah! All our work undone, all the work - What are these Martians?
What are we? I answered, clearing my throat. — H.G.Wells

The thing they wanted they called the Vote, but that demand so hollow, so eyeless, had all the terrifying effect of a mask. Behind that mask was a formless invincible discontent with the lot of womanhood. It wanted, - it was not clear what it wanted, but whatever it wanted, all the domestic instincts of mankind were against admitting there was anything it could want. — H.G.Wells

But by that time Lady Harman had acquired the habit of reading and the habit of thinking over what she read, and from that it is an easy step to thinking over oneself and the circumstances of one's own life. The one thing trains for the other. — H.G.Wells

Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the early twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands. — H.G.Wells

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. — H.G.Wells

Herbert George Wells, better known as H. G. Wells, was an English writer best known for such science fiction novels as The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man and The Island of Doctor Moreau. He was a prolific writer of both fiction and non-fiction, and produced works in many different genres, including contemporary novels, history, and social commentary. He was also an outspoken socialist. His later works become increasingly political and didactic, and only his early science fiction novels are widely read today. Wells, along with Hugo Gernsback and Jules Verne, is sometimes referred to as "The Father of Science Fiction". Source: Wikipedia — H.G.Wells

All we can do is to prepare for a universal language that will go on changing for ever. We don't know everything. We aren't final. I wish we could make that statement a part of the Fundamental Law. — H.G.Wells

Time is only a kind of Space. — H.G.Wells

Instead of offering me a Garibaldi biscuit, she asked me with that faint lisp of hers, to 'have some squashed flies, George'. — H.G.Wells

States organized for war will make war as surely as hens will lay eggs ... — H.G.Wells

As night goes round the Earth always there are hundreds of thousands of people who should be sleeping, lying awake, fearing a bully, fearing a cruel competition, dreading lest they cannot make good, ill of some illness they cannot comprehend, distressed by some irrational quarrel, maddened by some thwarted instinct or some suppressed perverted desire. — H.G.Wells

No. I cannot expect you to believe it. Take it as a lie
or a prophecy. Say I dreamed it in the workshop. Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race until I have hatched this fiction. Treat my assertion of its truth as a mere stroke of art to enhance its interest. And taking it as a story, what do you think of it? — H.G.Wells

Face this world. Learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end you will find clues to it all. — H.G.Wells