H. G. Wells Quotes
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The brain upon which my experiences have been written is not a particularly good one. If their were brain-shows, as there are cat and dog shows, I doubt if it would get even a third class prize.
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No place is safe - no place is at peace. There is no place where a women and her daughter can hide and be at peace. The war comes through the air, bombs drop in the night. Quiet people go out in the morning, and see air-fleets passing overhead - dripping death - dripping death!
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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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By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain.
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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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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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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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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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If we do not end war - war will end us. Everybody says that, millions of people believe it, and nobody does anything.
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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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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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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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For crude classifications and false generalisations are the curse of all organised human life.
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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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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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If I am something of a social leveller, it is not because I want to give silly people a good time, but because I want to make opportunity universal, and not leave out one single being who is worth while.
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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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'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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Man is an imperfect animal and never quite trustworthy in the dark.
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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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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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By this time I was no longer very much terrified or very miserable. I had, as it were, passed the limit of terror and despair. I felt now that my life was practically lost, and that persuasion made me capable of daring anything
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We must be prepared to see an Association of Nations in conference growing into an organic system of world controls for world affairs and the keeping of the world’s peace, or we must be prepared for – a continuation of war.