H.g. Wells Quotes

Look at the way people have swung through Communism, Toryism, Liberalism -- in vast blocks. In my father's boyhood you were either a Liberal or a Conservative in England, and there you stuck, and in America you were a sturdy individualist Democrat or Republican from the cradle to the grave. But now the Voice does it -- the pervading voice. And just nowit's come to a point when a Voice -- putting it straight and clear. Straight and clear...

~ H.g. Wells

They did not think politics was a great constructive process, they thought it was a kind of dog-fight. They wanted fun, they wanted spice, they wanted hits, they wanted also a chance to say 'Ear, 'ear! in an intelligent and honourable manner and clap their hands and drum with their feet. The great constructive process in history gives so little scope for clapping and drumming and saying 'Ear, 'ear! One might as well think of hounding on the solar system.

~ H.g. Wells

The only path of escape he could conceive as yet for Lady Harman lay through the chivalry of some other man. That a woman could possibly rebel against one man without the sympathy and moral maintenance of another was still outside the range of Mr. Brumley's understanding. It is still outside the range of most men's understandings -- and of a great many women's.

~ H.g. Wells

This self-reliance, this direct dealing with the world, seemed to him, even in the height of his concern, unwomanly, a deeper injury to his own abandoned assumptions than any he had contemplated.

~ H.g. Wells

He perceived too in these still hours how little he had understood her hitherto. He had been blinded, — obsessed. He had been seeing her and himself and the whole world far too much as a display of the eternal dualism of sex, the incessant pursuit. Now with his sexual imaginings newly humbled and hopeless, with a realization of her own tremendous minimization of that fundamental of romance, he began to see all that there was in her personality and their possible relations outside that. He saw how gravely and deeply serious was her fine philanthropy, how honest and simple and impersonal her desire for knowledge and understandings. There is the brain of her at least, he thought, far out of Sir Isaac's reach. She wasn't abased by her surrenders, their simplicity exalted her, showed her innocent and himself a flushed and congested soul. He perceived now with the astonishment of a man newly awakened just how the great obsession of sex had dominated him — for how many years? Since his early undergraduate days. Had he anything to put beside her own fine detachment? Had he ever since his manhood touched philosophy, touched a social question, thought of anything human, thought of art, or literature or belief, without a glancing reference of the whole question to the uses of this eternal hunt? During that time had he ever talked to a girl or woman with an unembarrassed sincerity? He stripped his pretences bare; the answer was no. His very refinements had been no more than indicative fig-leaves. His conservatism and morality had been a mere dalliance with interests that too brutal a simplicity might have exhausted prematurely. And indeed hadn't the whole period of literature that had produced him been, in its straining purity and refinement, as it were one glowing, one illuminated fig-leaf, a vast conspiracy to keep certain matters always in mind by conspicuously covering them away? But this wonderful woman — it seemed — she hadn't them in mind! She shamed him if only by her trustful unsuspiciousness of the ancient selfish game of Him and Her that he had been so ardently playing.... He idealized and worshipped this clean blindness. He abased himself before it.

~ H.g. Wells

We should strive to welcome change and challenges, because they are what help us grow. With out them we grow weak like the Eloi in comfort and security. We need to constantly be challenging ourselves in order to strengthen our character and increase our intelligence.

~ H.g. Wells

It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have a huge variety of needs and dangers.

~ H.g. Wells

New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not belittled the humiliating question arises 'Why then are you not taking part in them?

~ H.g. Wells

Oh, Lord! don't I know it's difficult! ... Don't I know that perhaps it's impossible! But it's the only way to do it. Therefore, I say, let's try to get it done. And everybody says, 'difficult, difficult,' and nobody lifts a finger to try. And the only real difficulty is that everybody for one reason or another says that it's difficult. It's against human nature. Granted! Every decent thing is. It's socialism. Who cares?

~ H.g. Wells

A certain beauty in the world is no mark of God's favor, said Mr. Huss. There is no beauty one may not balance by an equal ugliness. The warthog and the hyena, the tapeworm and the stinkhorn, are equally God's creations. Nothing you have said points to anything but a cold indifference towards us of this order in which we live. Beauty happens; it is not given. Pain, suffering, happiness; there is no heed. Only in the heart of man burns the fire of righteousness.

~ H.g. Wells

You can't see beauty with miserable eyes.

~ H.g. Wells

Beauty doesn't make happiness, it only comes to the happy.

~ H.g. Wells

They know they dare not have their stuff stripped down to plain words. These Bishops and parsons with their beloved Christianity are like a man who has poisoned his wife and says her body's too sacred for a post-mortem. Nowadays, by the light we have, any ecclesiastic must be born blind or an intellectual rascal. Don't tell me. The world's had this apostolic succession of oily old humbugs from early Egypt onwards, trying to come it over people. Antiquity's no excuse. A sham is no better for being six thousand years stale. Christianity's no more use to us now thanthe Pyramids.

~ H.g. Wells

But by that time Lady Harman had acquired the habit of reading and the habit of thinking over what she read, and from that it is an easy step to thinking over oneself and the circumstances of one's own life. The one thing trains for the other.

~ H.g. Wells

I think that at that time none of us quite believed in the Time Machine. The fact is, the Time Traveler 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. Had Filby shown the model and explained the matter in the Time Traveller's words, we should have shown him far less skepticism. For we should have perceived his motives; a pork butcher could understand Filby.

~ H.g. Wells

What I want to know is, in the Middle Ages, did they do anything for Housemaid's Knee? What did they put in their hot baths after jousting?

~ H.g. Wells

It doesn't follow that a nasty habit of mind is any less nasty because it's ancestral. It doesn't follow you can't cure it. Why scratch fleas for ever? Gambling, speculation, is a social disease. It's as natural and desirable as -- syphilis...

~ H.g. Wells

Given as much law as that man will be able to do anything and go anywhere, an the only trace of pessimism left in the human prospect today is a faint flavour that one was born so soon.

~ H.g. Wells

The essence of the Revolution is to abolish the attainment of unqualified power of man over man either by vote-getting, money-pressure or crude terror. The Revolution repudiates profit or terror altogether as methods of human intercourse. It turns the attention of men and women back from a frantic and futile struggle for the means of power, a struggle against our primary social instincts, to an innate urgency to make and to a beneficial competition for preeminence in social service. It recalls man to a clean and creative life from the entanglements and perversion of secondary issues into which he has fallen. It replaces property and official authority by the compelling prestige of sound achievement. Eminent service remains the only source of influence left in the world . . .

~ H.g. Wells

And suddenly he became almost lyric. For three thousand years the Common Man has been fended off from the full and glorious life he might have had, by Make Believe. For three thousand years in one form or another he has been asking for an unrestricted share in the universal welfare. He has been asking for a fair dividend from civilisation. For all that time, and still it goes on, the advantaged people, the satisfied people, the kings and priests, the owners and traders, the gentlefolk and the leaders he trusted, have been cheating him tacitly or deliberately, out of his proper share and contribution in the common life. Sometimes almost consciously, sometimes subconsciously, cheating themselves about it as well. When he called upon God, they said 'We'll take care of your God for you', and they gave him organised religion. When he calls for Justice, they say 'Everything decently and in order', and give him a nice expensive Law Court beyond his means. When he calls for order and safety too loudly they hit him on the head with a policeman's truncheon. When he sought knowledge, they told him what was good for him. And to protect him from the foreigner, so they said, they got him bombed to hell, trained him to disembowel his fellow common men with bayonets and learn what love of King and Country really means.All with the best intentions in the world, mind you.Most of these people, I tell you, have acted in perfect good faith. They manage to believe that in sustaining this idiot's muddle they are doingtremendous things -- stupendous things -- for the Common Man. They can live lives of quiet pride and die quite edifyingly in an undernourished, sweated, driven and frustrated world. Useful public servants! Righteous self-applause! Read their bloody biographies!

~ H.g. Wells

Man is now a new animal, a new and different animal; he can jump a hundred miles, see through brick walls, bombard atoms, analyse the stars, set about his business with the strength of a million horses. And so forth and so on. Yes. Yes. But all the same he goes on behaving like the weak little needy ape he used to be. He grabs, snarls, quarrels, fears, stampedes, and plays in his immense powder magazine until he seems likely to blow up the whole damned show.

~ H.g. Wells

Well, anyhow, the practical outcome of all these damn democratic ideas, is that men of our quality -- yes, damn it! we have a quality -- excuse themselves from the hard and thankless service they owe -- not to the crowd, Dick, but to the race. (Much good it will do is to shirk like that in the long run.) We will not presume, we say, no. We shrug our shoulders and leave the geese, the hungry sheep, the born followers, call them what you will, to the leaders who haven't our scruples. The poor muts swallow those dead old religions no longer fit for human consumption, and we say 'let 'em.' They devour their silly newspapers. They let themselves be distracted from public affairs by games, by gambling, by shows and coronations and every soft of mass stupidity, while the stars in their courses plot against them. We say nothing. Nothing audible. We mustn't destroy the simple faith that is marching them to disaster. We mustn't question their decisions. That wouldn't be democratic. And then we sit here and say privately that the poor riff-raff are failing to adapt themselves to those terrible new conditions -- as if they had had half a chance of knowing how things stand with them. They are shoved about by patriotisms, by obsolete religious prejudices, by racial delusions, by incomprehensible economic forces. Amid a growth of frightful machinery...

~ H.g. Wells

When Man realizes his littleness, his greatness can appear. But not before.

~ H.g. Wells

Suppose, and the facts leave us quite free to suppose it, suppose that the latent sapiens in us succeeds in its urge to rationalize life, suppose we do satisfy our dogmatic demand for freedom, equality, universal abundance, lives of achievement, hope and cooperation throughout this still largely unexplored and undeveloped planet, and find ourselves all the better for having done so. It can be done. It may be done. Suppose it done. Surely that in itself will be good living. “But,” says that dead end; that human blight, Mr. Chamble Pewter, making his point with a squeak in his voice and tears of controversial bitterness in his eyes, “What is the good of it? Will there be any finality in your success?” he asks. None whatever, is the answer. Why should there be? Yet a vista of innumerable happy generations, an abundance of life at present inconceivable, and at the end, not extinction necessarily, not immortality, but complete uncertainty, is surely sufficient prospect for the present. We are not yet Homo sapiens, but when at last our intermingled and selected offspring, carrying on the life that is now in us, when they, who are indeed ourselves, our heredity of body, thought and will, reassembled and enhanced, have established their claim to that title — can we doubt that they will be facing things at present unimaginable, weighing pros and cons altogether beyond our scope? They will see far and wide in an ever-growing light while we see as in a glass darkly. Things yet unimaginable. They may be good by our current orientation of things; they may be evil. Why should they not be in the nature of our good and much more than our good —“beyond good and evil?

~ H.g. Wells

You cannot imagine the craving for rest that I feel—a hunger and thirst. For six long days, since my work was done, my mind has been a whirlpool, swift, unprogressive and incessant, a torrent of thoughts leading nowhere, spinning round swift and steady

~ H.g. Wells

The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature.

~ H.g. Wells

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.

~ H.g. Wells

We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity.

~ H.g. Wells

It is when suffering finds a voice andsets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.

~ H.g. Wells

I never yet heard of a useless thing that was not ground out ofexistence by evolution sooner or later. Did you? And pain gets needless.

~ H.g. Wells

The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the painin the world had found a voice

~ H.g. Wells

For it is just this question of pain that partsus. So long as visible or audible pain turns you sick; so long as your ownpains drive you; so long as pain underlies your propositions aboutsin,—so long, I tell you, you are an animal, thinking a little less obscurelywhat an animal feels.

~ H.g. Wells

Common sense and every material reality insisted upon the unification of human life throughout the planet and the socialisation of its elementary needs, and pitted against that was the fact that every authority, every institution, every established way of thinking and living was framed to preserve the advantages of the ruling and possessing minority and the separate sovereignty of the militant states that had been evolved within the vanished circumstances of the past.

~ H.g. Wells

The essential question was always Who are these fellows who give us orders? By what warrant? And how do we benefit and how does the world benefit? But they are doing no good to anyone, no real good even to themselves! This is not government and leadership; this is imposture. Why stand it?...Why stand it?

~ H.g. Wells

This sense of insecurity was falling about the entire planet and though people went on doing the things they usually did, they had none of the assurance, the happy-go-lucky all-right feeling, that had hitherto sustained normal men. They went on doing their customary things because they could not think of anything else to do. They tried to believe, and many did succeed in believing, that there would presently be a turn for the better. They did nothing to bring about that turn for the better; they just hoped it would occur.

~ H.g. Wells

Tewler Americanus in particular was irritated by a harsh logic that overrode his dearest belief in his practical isolation, whenever he chose to withdraw himself, from the affairs of the rest of the world. He had escaped from the old world and he hated to feel that he was being drawn back to share a common destiny with the rest of mankind.

~ H.g. Wells

Why are these things permitted? What sins have we done? The morning service was over, I was walking through the roads to clear my brain for the afternoon, and then—fire, earthquake, death! As if it were Sodom and Gomorrah! All our work undone, all the work— What are these Martians? What are we? I answered, clearing my throat.

~ H.g. Wells

There are kisses and kisses, I am told, and this must have been quite the other sort from Millie's resonant signals of regard.

~ H.g. Wells

Jesus was a penniless teacher who wandered about the dusty sun-bit country of Judea, living upon casual gifts of food; yet he is always represented clean, combed, and sleek, in spotless raiment, erect, and with something motionless about him as though he was gliding through the air. This alone has made him unreal and incredible to many people who cannot distinguish the core of the story from the ornamental and unwise additions of the unintelligently devout.

~ H.g. Wells

The thing they wanted they called the Vote, but that demand so hollow, so eyeless, had all the terrifying effect of a mask. Behind that mask was a formless invincible discontent with the lot of womanhood. It wanted, — it was not clear what it wanted, but whatever it wanted, all the domestic instincts of mankind were against admitting there was anything it could want.

~ H.g. Wells