H. G. Wells Quotes
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Rowena: You’ve got the subtlety of a bullfrog.
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The true strength of rulers and empires lies not in armies or emotions, but in the belief of men that they are inflexibly open and truthful and legal. As soon as a government departs from that standard it ceases to be anything more than 'the gang in possession,' and its days are numbered.
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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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Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change.
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I was invisible, and I was only just beginning to realise the extraordinary advantage my invisibility gave me. My head was already teeming with plans of all the wild and wonderful things I had now impunity to do.
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The German people are an orderly, vain, deeply sentimental and rather insensitive people. They seem to feel at their best when they are singing in chorus, saluting or obeying orders.
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We want to get rid of the militarist not simply because he hurts and kills, but because he is an intolerable thick-voiced blockhead who stands hectoring and blustering in our way of achievement.
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To this day I have never troubled about the ethics of the matter. The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature.
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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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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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You must follow me carefully. I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted. The geometry, for instance, they taught you at school is founded on a misconception.
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A time will come when men will sit with history before them or with some old newspaper before them and ask incredulously,"Was there ever such a world?"
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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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It is the going out from oneself that is love and not the accident of its return. It is the expedition, whether it fail or succeed.
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Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the early twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands.
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Losing your way on a journey is unfortunate. But, losing your reason for the journey is a fate more cruel.
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All four Gospels agree in giving us a picture of a very definite personality. One is obliged to say, "Here was a man. This could not have been invented.
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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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The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.
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There were no object lessons, and the studies of bookkeeping and French were pursued (but never effectually overtaken.
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There is no upper limit to what individuals are capable of doing with their minds. There is no age limit that bars them from beginning. There is no obstacle that cannot be overcome if they persist and believe.
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In the scientific world I find just that disinterested devotion to great ends that I hope will spread at last through the entire range of human activity.
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Mankind which began in a cave and behind a windbreak will end in the disease-soaked ruins of a slum.
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Practically I thought I had impunity to do whatever I chose, everything-save to give away my secret. So I thought. Whatever I did, whatever the consequences might be, was nothing to me. I had merely to fling aside my garments and vanish. No person could hold me. I could take my money where I found it.