H. G. Wells Quotes
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Man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him.
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I had rather be called a journalist than an artist.
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The past is the beginning of the beginning and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.
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Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.
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The Time Machine (1895)
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In England we have come to rely upon a comfortable time-lag of fifty years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it.
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The past is but the past of a beginning.
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It sounds plausible enough tonight, but wait until tomorrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning.
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Life, forever dying to be born afresh, forever young and eager, will presently stand upon this Earth as upon a footstool, and stretch out its realm amidst the stars.
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Raymond Passworthy: Oh, God, is there ever to be any age of happiness? Is there never to be any rest?
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'The man's become inhuman, I tell you,' said Kemp. 'I am as sure he will establish a reign of terror-so soon as he has got over the emotions of this escape-as I am sure I am talking to you. Our only chance is to be ahead. He has cut himself off from his kind. His blood be upon his own head.'
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In politics, strangely enough, the best way to play your cards is to lay them face upwards on the table.
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I remember I felt an extraordinary persuasion that I was being played with, that presently, when I was upon the very verge of safety, this mysterious death-as swift as the passage of light-would leap after me from the pit about the cylinder and strike me down.
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A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own.
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Human history in essence is the history of ideas.
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In all the round world of Utopia there is no meat. There used to be, but now we cannot stand the thought of slaughterhouses. And it is impossible to find anyone who will hew a dead ox or pig. I can still remember as a boy the rejoicings over the closing of the last slaughterhouse.
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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.
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No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.
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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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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.
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Great and strange ideas transcending experience often have less effect upon men and women than smaller, more tangible considerations.
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The only true measure of success is the ratio between what we might have done and what we might have been on the one hand, and the thing we have made and the things we have made of ourselves on the other.
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Great and little cannot understand one another. But in every child born of man, Father Redwood, lurks some seed of greatness - waiting for the Food.
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There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection.