Top 359 Quotes & Sayings by H. G. Wells - Page 3

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.

The teacher, whether mother, priest, or schoolmaster, is the real maker of history.

The choice is: the Universe...or nothing.

The true objection to slavery is not that it is unjust to the inferior but that it corrupts the superior.

It is highly probable that the bulk of the Jew's ancestors 'never' lived in Palestine 'at all,' which witnesses the power of historical assertion over fact.

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.

I came out for exercise, gentle exercise, and to notice the scenery and to botanise. And no sooner do I get on that accursed machine than off I go hammer and tongs; I never look to right or left, never notice a flower, never see a view - get hot, juicy, red - like a grilled chop. Get me on that machine and I have to go. I go scorching along the road, and cursing aloud at myself for doing it.

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?"

This is the end and the beginning of an age. This is something far greater than the French Revolution or the Reformation and we live in it.

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.

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.

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

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.

The great trouble with you Americans is that you are still under the influence of that second-rate - shall I say third-rate? - mind, Karl Marx.

New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not belittled the humiliating question arises 'Why then are you not taking part in them?

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.

One believes in Stephen Dedalus as one believes in few characters in fiction.

...fact takes no heed of human hopes.

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

Human society is based on want. Life is based on want. Wild-eyed visionaries may dream of a world without need. Cloud-cuckoo-land. It can't be done.

Human history is, in essence, a history of ideas.

Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe swims.

Endless conflicts. Endless misunderstanding. All life is that. Great and little cannot understand one another.

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?'

A day will come when beings, now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon Earth as a footstool and laugh, and reach out their hands amidst the stars.

Is it any wonder that to this day this Galilean is too much for our small hearts?

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.

I write as straight as I can, just as I walk as straight as I can, because that is the best way to get there.

It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble.

It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.

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.

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.

[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.

We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity.

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.

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.

I don't think you fully appreciate the importance of Illusion in life, the Essential Nature of Lies and Deception of the body politic.

We live in reference to past experience and not to future events, however inevitable.

There is no remorse like the remorse of Chess

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.

I am an historian, I am not a believer, but I must confess as a historian that this penniless preacher from Nazareth is irrevocably the very center of history. Jesus Christ is easily the most dominant figure in all history.

Biologists can be just as sensitive to heresy as theologians.

Ignorance is not an extension of time

We were not making war against Germany, we were being ordered about in the King's war with Germany.

Marriage isn't what it was. It's become a different thing because women have become human beings.

We're in a blessed drainpipe, and we've got to crawl along it till we die.

I don't suppose any man has ever understood any woman since the beginning of things. You don't understand our imaginations, how wild our imaginations can 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.

We want to get rid of the militarist not simply because he hurts and kills, but because he is an intolerable thick-voiced blockhead who stands hectoring and blustering in our way of achievement.

Tell the truth and read story books;it will take you to the magical moment in a glory night.

There was a time when I believed in the story and the scheme of salvation, so far as I could understand it, just as I believed there was a Devil... Suddenly the light broke through to me and I knew this God was a lie... For indeed it is a silly story, and each generation nowadays swallows it with greater difficulty... Why do people go on pretending about this Christianity?

Non-violence is the policy of the vegetable kingdom.

Hinduism is synonymous with humanism. That is its essence and its great liberating quality.

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.

To ride a bicycle properly is very like a love affair-chiefly it is a matter of faith. Believe you do it, and the thing is done; doubt, and, for the life of you, you cannot.

The Athenian democracy suffered much from that narrowness of patriotism which is the ruin of all nations.

...the Idumeans (Edomites) were...made Jews...and a Turkish people (Khazars) were mainly Jews in South Russia...The main part of Jewry never was in Judea and had never come out of Judea.

The establishment of the world community will surely exact a price – and who can tell what that price may be? – in toil, suffering and blood.

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.

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