H. G. Wells Quotes
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If Max [Aitken] gets to Heaven he won't last long. He will be chucked out for trying to pull off a merger between Heaven and Hell ... after having secured a controlling interest in key subsidiary companies in both places, of course.
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You Americans have the loveliest wine in the world, you know, but you don't realize it. You call them domestic and that's enough to start trouble anywhere.
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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.
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With wine and food, the confidence of my own table, and the necessity of reassuring my wife, I grew by insensible degrees courageous and secure.
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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 is, though I do not know how there is or why there is, a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven. There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope.
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I believe that the crazy combative patriotism that plainly threatens to destroy civilisation to-day is very largely begotten by the schoolmaster and the schoolmistress in their history lessons. They take the growing mind at a naturally barbaric phase and they inflame and fix its barbarism.
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The true sweetness of chess, if it ever can be sweet, is to see a victory snatched, by some happy impertinence, out of the shadow of apparently irrevocable disaster.
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I felt naked. I felt as perhaps a bird may feel in the clear air knowing the hawk wings above and will swoop. I began to feel the need of fellowship. I wanted to question, wanted to speak, wanted to relate my experience. What is this spirit in man that urges him forever to depart from happiness, to toil and to place himself in danger?
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Science has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use. It is time she held her hand.
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We do not want dictators, we do not want oligarchic parties or class rule, we want a widespread world intelligence conscious of itself. To work out a way to that world brain organization is therefore our primary need in this age of imperative construction.
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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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This is the end and the beginning of an age. This is something far greater than the French Revolution or the Reformation and we live in it.
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Our challenge is not to educate the children we used to have or want to have, but to educate the children who come to the schoolhouse door.
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London, ... like a bowl of viscid human fluid, boils sullenly over the rim of its encircling hills and slops messily into the home counties.
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I felt the first inkling of a thing that presently grew quite clear in my mind, that oppressed me for many days, a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer a master, but an animal among the animals, under the Martian heel.With us it would be as with them, to lurk and watch, to run and hide; the fear and empire of man had passed away.
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War is a curtain of dense black fabric across all the hopes and kindliness of mankind. Yet always it has let through some gleams of light, and not--I am not dreaming--it grows threadbare, and here and there and at a thousand points the light is breaking through.
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He was inordinately proud of England, and he abused her incessantly.
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The Jews looked for a special savior, a messiah, who was to redeem mankind by the agreeable process of restoring the fabulous glories of David and Solomon, and bringing the whole world at last under the firm but benevolent Jewish heel.
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It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble.
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once you lose yourself, you have two choices: find the person you used to be, or lose that person completely.
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In all the round world there is no meat. There used to be. But now we cannot stand the thought of slaughterhouses.
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After your first day of cycling, one dream is inevitable. A memory of motion lingers in the muscles of your legs, and round and round they seem to go. You ride through Dreamland on wonderful dream bicycles that change and grow.