H. G. Wells Quotes
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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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Mankind which began in a cave and behind a windbreak will end in the disease-soaked ruins of a slum.
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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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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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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 fact is, the Time Traveller was one of those men who are too clever to be believed: you never felt that you saw all round him; you always suspected some subtle reserve, some ingenuity in ambush, behind his lucid frankness.
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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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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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once you lose yourself, you have two choices: find the person you used to be, or lose that person completely.
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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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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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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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...the Idumeans (Edomites) were...made Jews...and a Turkish people (Khazars) were mainly Jews in South Russia...The main part of Jewry never was in Judea and had never come out of Judea.
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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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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.
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He was inordinately proud of England, and he abused her incessantly.