H. G. Wells Quotes

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.

Marguerite, joyfully: “We are ourselves, my dear, we are ourselves. We<nowiki/>'ll never be anyone else.”

When the history of our civilization is written, it will be a biological history and Margaret Sanger will be its heroine.

I am more to the Left than you, Mr. Stalin.

I was never a great amorist, though I have loved several people very deeply.

I confess that I approached Stalin with a certain amount of suspicion and prejudice. A picture had been built up in my mind of a very reserved and self-centred fanatic, a despot without vices, a jealous monopolizer of power. [...] I still expected to meet a ruthless, hard—possibly doctrinaire—and self-sufficient man at Moscow; a Georgian highlander whose spirit had never completely emerged from its native mountain glen. Yet I had had to recognize that under him Russia was not being merely tyrannized over and held down; it was being governed and it was getting on. [...] All such shadowy undertow, all suspicion of hidden emotional tensions, ceased for ever, after I had talked to him for a few minutes. [...] I have never met a man more candid, fair and honest, and to these qualities it is, and to nothing occult and sinister, that he owes his tremendous undisputed ascendency in Russia.

I do not deny that force has to be used, but I think the forms of the struggle should fit as closely as possible to the opportunities presented by the existing laws, which must be defended against reactionary attacks. There is no need to disorganise the old system, because it is disorganising itself enough as it is. That is why it seems to me insurrection against the old orders, against the law, is obsolete, old-fashioned.

The effects of the ideas of Roosevelt's ‘new deal’ is most powerful, and in my opinion they are socialist ideas

The authorities in Soviet Russia seem as timorous about subversive propaganda as Conservative old ladies in England. Russia is still a fastness of orthodoxy, even if the guardianship of orthodoxy has changed hands.

How far can we anticipate the habitations and ways, the usages and adventures, the mighty employments, the ever increasing knowledge and power of the days to come? No more than a child with its scribbling paper and its box of bricks can picture or model the undertakings of its adult years. Our battle is with cruelties and frustrations, stupid, heavy and hateful things from which we shall escape at last, less like victors conquering a world than like sleepers awaking from a nightmare in the dawn.... A time will come when men will sit with history before them or with some old newspaper before them and ask incredulously,"Was there ever such a world?"

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.

In England we have come to rely upon a comfortable time lag of fifty years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it.

An artist who theorizes about his work is no longer artist but critic.

The Baldwin government...has carried its support of the aggressive and reactionary Mussolini dictatorship to a pitch which amounts to a virtual betrayal of both France and the republican régime in Germany.

On the supposition that the world is to go on divided among aggressive sovereign states, with phases of war preparation known as peace and acute phases of more and more destructive war, it is quite a good move in the game. On the supposition that the world is growing up to an age of reason, and that a world of civilisation is attainable, it is a monstrous crime.