Top 359 Quotes & Sayings by H. G. Wells - Page 5

...instead of offering me a Garibaldi biscuit, she asked me with that faint lisp of hers, to 'have some squashed flies, George'.

Men who think in lifetimes are of little use to statesmanship.

It's no use locking the door after the steed is stolen.

I felt naked. I felt as perhaps a bird may feel in the clear air knowing the hawk wings above and will swoop. I began to feel the need of fellowship. I wanted to question, wanted to speak, wanted to relate my experience. What is this spirit in man that urges him forever to depart from happiness, to toil and to place himself in danger?

It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening.

Better it is toward the right conduct of life to consider what will be the end of a thing, than what is the beginning of it: for what promises fair at first may prove ill, and what seems at first a disadvantage, may prove very advantageous.

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

IBM is helping to greatly advance and expedite quality sampling while providing our project investigators peace of mind that the information they are gathering is securely stored and protected.

And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers - shriveled now, and brown and flat and brittle - to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of men.

Socialism is the preparation for that higher Anarchism; painfully, laboriously we mean to destroy false ideas of property and self, eliminate unjust laws and poisonous and hateful suggestions and prejudices, create a system of social right-dealing and a tradition of right-feeling and action. Socialism is the schoolroom of true and noble Anarchism, wherein by training and restraint we shall make free men.

Night, the mother of fear and mystery, was coming upon me.

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.

Only people who are well off can be - complex.

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.

Anthropology has been compared to a great region, marked out indeed as within the sphere of influence of science, but unsettled and for the most part unsubdued. Like all such hinterland sciences, it is a happy hunting-ground for adventurers.

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.

I am for world-control of production and of trade and transport, for a world coinage, and the confederation of mankind. I am for the super-State.

The science hangs like a gathering fog in a valley, a fog which begins nowhere and goes nowhere, an incidental, unmeaning inconvenience to passers-by.

Democracy's ceremonial, its feast, it's great function, is the election.

Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough---as most wrong theories are!

The great body of physical science, a great deal of the essential fact of financial science, and endless social and political problems are only accessible and only 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 worldwide 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.

There are no social differences - till women come in.

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.

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.

And all over the countryside, he knew, on every crest and hill, where once the hedges had interlaced, and cottages, churches, inns, and farmhouses had nestled among their trees, wind wheels similar to those he saw and bearing like vast advertisements, gaunt and distinctive symbols of the new age, cast their whirling shadows and stored incessantly the energy that flowed away incessantly through all the arteries of the city. ... The great circular shapes of complaining wind-wheels blotted out the heavens.

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.

So utterly at variance is Destiny with all the little plans of men.

He spares no resource in telling of his dead inventions... Bare verbs he rarely tolerates. He splits infinitives and fills them up with adverbial stuffing. He presses the passing colloquialism into his service. His vast paragraphis sweat and struggle; the

Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the mind of a pedant), perfection is the mere repudiation of that ineluctable marginal inexactitude which is the mysterious inmost quality of Being

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.

States organized for war will make war as surely as hens will lay eggs.

I doubt if these two fine, active minds [President and Mrs. Roosevelt] have ever inquiried how it is they know what they know and think as they do. Nor have they ever thought of what they might have been if they had grown up in an entirely different culture. They have the disposition of all politicians world over to deal only with made opinion. They have never inquired how it is that opinion is made.

But there are times when the little cloud spreads, until it obscures the sky. And those times I look around at my fellow men and I am reminded of some likeness of the beast-people, and I feel as though the animal is surging up in them. And I know they are neither wholly animal nor holy man, but an unstable combination of both.

The idea of a world commonweal has to be established as the criterion of political institutions, and also as the criterion of general conduct in hundreds of millions of brains. It has to dominate education everywhere in the world. When that end is achieved, then the world state will be achieved.

There were no object lessons, and the studies of bookkeeping and French were pursued (but never effectually overtaken.

We are but phantoms ... and the phantoms of phantoms, desires like cloud-shadows and wills of straw that eddy in the wind; the days pass, use and wont carry us through as a train carries the shadow of its lights.

How small the vastest of human catastrophes may seem, at a distance of a few million miles.

Go away... I'm alright.

I was never a great amorist, though I have loved several people very deeply.

It's against reason," said Filby. "What reason?" said the Time Traveller.

Chess is a curse upon a man.

After your first day of cycling, one dream is inevitable. A memory of motion lingers in the muscles of your legs, and round and round they seem to go. You ride through Dreamland on wonderful dream bicycles that change and grow.

If we suppose a sufficient righteousness and intelligence in men to produce presently, from the tremendous lessons of history, an effective will for a world peace - that is to say, an effective will for a world law under a world government - for in no other fashion is a secure world peace conceivable - in what manner may we expect things to move towards this end? . . . It is an educational task, and its very essence is to bring to the minds of all men everywhere, as a necessary basis for world cooperation, a new telling and interpretation, a common interpretation, of history.

The fertilising conflict of individualities is the ultimate meaning of the personal life.

The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the pain in the world had found a voice

You are trying to do a more difficult thing than record folk songs; you are trying to record life.

An immense and ever-increasing wealth of knowledge is scattered about the world today; knowledge that would probably suffice to solve all the mighty difficulties of our age, but it is dispersed and unorganized. We need a sort of mental clearing house for the mind: a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared.

By this time I was no longer very much terrified or very miserable. I had, as it were, passed the limit of terror and despair. I felt now that my life was practically lost, and that persuasion made me capable of daring anything

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.

We must be prepared to see an Association of Nations in conference growing into an organic system of world controls for world affairs and the keeping of the world’s peace, or we must be prepared for – a continuation of war.

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

But-! I say! The common conventions of humanity-' 'Are all very well for common people.

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.

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?

Alone-- it is wonderful how little a man can do alone! To rob a little, to hurt a little, and there is the end.

The fact is, the Time Traveller was one of those men who are too clever to be believed: you never felt that you saw all round him; you always suspected some subtle reserve, some ingenuity in ambush, behind his lucid frankness.

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?

Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness. The work of ameliorating the conditions of life -- the true civilizing process that makes life more and more secure -- had gone steadily on to a climax... And the harvest was what I saw.

I never yet heard of a useless thing that was not ground out of existence by evolution sooner or later. Did you? And pain gets needless.

Go away. I'm all right. [last words]