H. G. Wells Quotes
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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.
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How small the vastest of human catastrophes may seem at a distance of a few million miles.
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Most striking, perhaps, in their general appearance was the disproportion between the legs of these creatures and the length of their bodies; and yet - so relative is our idea of grace - my eye became habituated to their forms, and at last I even fell in with their persuasion that my own long thighs were ungainly.
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The Anglo-Saxon genius for parliamentary government asserted itself; there was a great deal of talk and no decisive action.
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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.
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I went over the heads of the things a man reckons desirable. No doubt invisibility made it possible to get them, but it made it impossible to enjoy them when they are got.
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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.
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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.
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...instead of offering me a Garibaldi biscuit, she asked me with that faint lisp of hers, to 'have some squashed flies, George'.
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Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future.
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It is only now and then, in a jungle, or amidst the towering white menace of a burnt or burning Australian forest, that Nature strips the moral veils from vegetation and we apprehend its stark ferocity.
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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.
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Oswald Cabal: Dragging out life to the last possible second is not living to the best effect. The nearer the bone, the sweeter the meat. The best of life, Passworthy, lies nearest to the edge of death.
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Endless conflicts. Endless misunderstanding. All life is that. Great and little cannot understand one another.
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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.
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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.
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He had developed in the most wonderful way the distinctive silliness of man without losing one jot of the natural folly of a monkey.
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'We were making the future,' he said, 'and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making. And here it is!'
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If your life doesn't end in failure, you haven't reached high enough. So it was failure I had to achieve.
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Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write!
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Let us get together with other people of our sort and make over the world into a great world-civilization that will enable us to realize the promises and avoid the dangers of this new time.
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Oswald Cabal: Little animals. And if we’re no more than animals, we must snatch each little scrap of happiness, and live, and suffer, and pass, mattering no more than all the other animals do or have done. It is this, or that. All the universe or nothing. Which shall it be, Passworthy? Which shall it be?
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Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia.
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The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities and businesses and economic relations, shook them also out of their old-established habits of thought, and out of the lightly held beliefs and prejudices that came down to them from the past.