H. G. Wells Quotes

The serious people who took him seriously never felt quite sure of his deportment; they were somehow aware that trusting their reputations for judgment with him was like furnishing a nursery with egg-shell china.

The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.

The man’s become inhuman, I tell you,” said Kemp. “I am as sure he will establish a reign of terror — so soon as he has got over the emotions of this escape — as I am sure I am talking to you. Our only chance is to be ahead. He has cut himself off from his kind. His blood be upon his own head.

Don't you think you would attract attention?' said the Medical Man. 'Our ancestors had no great tolerance for anachronisms.

Or did a Martian sit within each, ruling, directing, using, much as a man's brain sits and rules in his body? I began to compare the things to human machines, to ask myself for the first time in my life how an ironclad or a steam engine would seem to an intelligent lower animal.

The fever of war that would presently clog vein and artery, deaden nerve, and destroy brain, had yet to develop.

What a huge inaccessible lumber-room of thought and experience we amounted to, I thought; how much we are, how little we transmit.

I felt all the wretcheder for the lack of a breakfast. Hunger and a lack of blood-corpuscles take all the manhood from a man.

He sighed and looked about him. 'This is no world for men,' he said. 'And yet in a way...it appeals.

He showed it to me with all the confiding zest of a man who has been living too much alone. This seclusion was overflowing now in an excess of confidence, and I had the good luck to be the recipient.

"And then," said Sarnac, "I remember that I made a prophecy. I made it - when did I make it? Two thousand years ago? Or two weeks ago? I sat in Fanny's little sitting-room, an old-world creature amidst her old-world furnishings, and I said that men and women would not always suffer as we were suffering then. I said that we were still poor savages, living only in the bleak dawn of civilisation, and that we suffered because we were under-bred, under-trained and darkly ignorant of ourselves, that the mere fact that we knew our own unhappiness was the promise of better things and that a day would come when charity and understanding would light the world so that men and women would no longer hurt themselves and one another as they were doing now everywhere, universally, in law and in restriction and in jealousy and in hate, all round and about the earth."

"The history of mankind," said Dreed, "has been a history of betrayals, the perennial betrayal of the common man by the men he has trusted."

"By the men the lazy, haphazard, childish oaf was too wilfully stupid to mistrust," said Bodisham. "The history of mankind from the very beginning has been a history of over-trusted trustees, corrupted by their unchecked opportunities."

Roman Catholicism is a broken and utterly desperate thing, capable only of malignant mischief in our awakening world.

My mood, I say, was one of exaltation. I felt as a seeing man might do, with padded feet and noiseless clothes, in a city of the blind. I experienced a wild impulse to jest, to startle people, to clap men on the back, fling people’s hats astray, and generally revel in my extraordinary advantage.

Aren't we all agreed about those things — in theory?'

In theory, yes,' said Bobby. 'But not in reality. If every one really wanted to abolish the difference of rich and poor it would be as easy as pie to find a way. There's always a way to everything if you want to do it enough. But nobody really wants to do these things. Not as we want meals. All sorts of other things people want, but wanting to have no rich and poor any more isn't real wanting; it is just a matter of pious sentiment. And so it is about war. We don't want to be poor and we don't want to be hurt or worried by war, but that's not wanting to end those things.