H. G. Wells Quotes
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[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.
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The man was running away with the rest, and selling his papers for a shilling each as he ran—a grotesque mingling of profit and panic.
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He began to realize that you cannot even fight happily with creatures that stand upon a different mental basis to yourself.
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You have, let us say, a promising politician, a rising artist that you wish to destroy. Dagger or bomb are archaic, clumsy and unreliable - but teach him, inoculate him with chess.
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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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There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.
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We have learned now that we cannot regard this planet as being fenced in and a secure abiding place for Man we can never anticipate the unseen good or evil that may come upon us suddenly out of space.
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There is space in its philosophy for everyone which is one reason why India is a home to every single religion in the world.
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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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Humanity either makes, or breeds, or tolerates all its afflictions, great or small.
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We can't have any weak or silly. Life is real again, and the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die. They ought to die. They ought to be willing to die. It's a sort of disloyalty, after all, to live and taint the race.
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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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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.
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The weaving of mankind into one community does not imply the creation of a homogeneous community, but rather the reverse; the welcome and adequate utilization of distinctive quality in an atmosphere of understanding... Communities all to one pattern, like boxes of toy soldiers, are things of the past, rather than of the future.
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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.
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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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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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Patriotism has become a mere national self assertion, a sentimentality of flag-cheering with no constructive duties.
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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.
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I do not propose to add anything to what has already been written concerning the loss of the "Lady Vain."
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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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I see knowledge increasing and human power increasing, I see everincreasing possibilities before life, and I see no limits set to it all. Existence impresses me as a perpetual dawn. Our lives, as I apprehend them, swim in expectation.
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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.