H. G. Wells Quotes
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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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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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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.
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I want to go ahead of Father Time with a scythe of my own.
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You cannot imagine the craving for rest that I feel-a hunger and thirst. For six long days, since my work was done, my mind has been a whirlpool, swift, unprogressive and incessant, a torrent of thoughts leading nowhere, spinning round swift and steady.
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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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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.
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The path of social advancement is, and must be, strewn with broken friendships.
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What really matters is what you do with what you have.
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There is no more evil thing in this world than race prejudice, none at all. [...] It justifies and holds together more baseness, cruelty, and abomination than any other sort of error in the world.
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Leaders should lead as far as they can and then vanish. Their ashes should not choke the fire they have lit.
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Heresies are experiments in man's unsatisfied search for truth.
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While there is a chance of the world getting through its troubles, I hold that a reasonable man has to behave as though he were sure of it. If at the end your cheerfulness in not justified, at any rate you will have been cheerful.
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Our true nationality is mankind.
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Every one of these hundreds of millions of human beings is in some form seeking happiness...Not one is altogether noble nor altogether trustworthy nor altogether consistent; and not one is altogether vile...Not a single one but has at some time wept.
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Biologically the species is the accumulation of the experiments of all its successful individuals since the beginning.
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Let your love be stronger than your hate or anger. Learn the wisdom of compromise, for it is better to bend a little than to break.
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Be a man!... What good is religion if it collapses under calamity? Think of what earthquakes and floods, wars and volcanoes, have done before to men! Did you think that God had exempted [us]? He is not an insurance agent.
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...the voice was indisputable. It continued to swear with that breadth and variety that distinguishes the swearing of a cultivated man.
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A strange persuasion came upon me that, save for the grossness of the line, the grotesqueness of the forms, I had here before me the whole balance of human life in miniature, the whole interplay of instinct, reason, and fate in its simplest form.
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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.
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Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
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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.
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Every citizen knows his place. He is born to that place, and the elaborate discipline of training and education and surgery he undergoes fits him at last so completely to it that he has neither ideas nor organs for any purpose beyond it.