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H. G. Wells

165 quotes

• “How small the vastest of human catastrophes may seem at a distance of a few million miles.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1897 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Star", final line, first published in The Graphic, Christmas issue (1897)

• “We were making the future," he said, "and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making. And here it is!”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1899 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: When The Sleeper Wakes (1899)

• “If it is proper to ’reconstitute’ a Jewish State which has not existed for two thousand years, why not go back another thousand years end reconstitute the Canaanite state? The Canaanites, unlike the Jews, are still there.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1901 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Discovery of the Future (1901)

• “Great and little cannot understand one another. But in every child born of man, Father Redwood, lurks some seed of greatness — waiting for the Food.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1904 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth (1904) - Online PDF and Epub

• “They may fight against greatness in us who are the children of men, but can they conquer? Even if they should destroy us every one, what then? Would it save them? No! For greatness is abroad, not only in us, not only in the Food, but in the purpose of all things! It is in the nature of all things, it is part of space and time. To grow and still to grow, from first to last that is Being, that is the law of life. What other law can there be?”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1904 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth (1904)

• “Kipps was unprepared for the unpleasant truth; that the path of social advancement is and must be strewn with broken friendships.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1905 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Kipps the Story of a Simple Soul (1905) Bk. 2, ch. 5

• “Whatever America has to show in heroic living to-day, I doubt if she can show any thing finer than the quality of the resolve, the steadfast effort hundreds of black and coloured men are making to-day to live blamelessly, honourably, and patiently, getting for themselves what scraps of refinement, learning, and beauty they may, keeping their hold on a civilization they are grudged and denied.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1906 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Future in America (1906)

• “The third peculiarity of aerial warfare was that it was at once enormously destructive and entirely indecisive.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1907 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The War in the Air (1907), Ch. VIII, §1

• “Just as science aims at a common organized body of knowledge to which all its servants contribute and in which they share, so Socialism insists upon its ideal of an organized social order which every man serves and by which every man benefits. Their common enemy is the secret-thinking, self-seeking man. Secrecy, subterfuge and the private gain: these are the enemies of Socialism and the adversaries of science.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1893 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: New Worlds For Old, (1908). Quoted in W. Warren Wager, H. G. Wells: Journalism and Prophecy, 1893-1946; an anthology (1964).

• “And in the air are no streets, no channels, no point where one can say of an antagonist, "If he wants to reach my capital he must come by here." In the air all directions lead everywhere.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1908 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The War in the Air (1908)

• “Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the early twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1914 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The World Set Free (1914)

• “The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities and businesses and economic relations, shook them also out of their old-established habits of thought, and out of the lightly held beliefs and prejudices that came down to them from the past.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo. It is the peculiar snare of the perplexed orthodox, and soon Mr. Brumley was in a state of nearly unendurable moral indignation with Sir Isaac for a hundred exaggerations of what he was and of what conceivably he might have done to his silent yet manifestly unsuitably married wife.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1914 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman (1914), p. 299

• “I had rather be called a journalist than an artist.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1915 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter to author Henry James (8 July 1915)

• “Cynicism is humour in ill health.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1915 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump (1915)

• “The uglier a man's legs are, the better he plays golf. It's almost a law.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1915 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Bealby: A Holiday (1915)

• “I hate and despise a shrewish suspicion of foreigners and foreign ways; a man who can look me in the face, laugh with me, speak truth and deal fairly, is my brother, though his skin is as black as ink or as yellow as an evening primrose.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1916 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: What is Coming? (1916)

• “The age of ‘expansion,’ the age of European "empires" is near its end. No one who can read the signs of the times in Japan, in India, in China, can doubt it. It ended in America a hundred years ago; it is ending now in Asia; it will end last in Africa, and even in Africa the end draws near.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1916 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: What is Coming? (1916)

• “He was inordinately proud of England, and he abused her incessantly.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1916 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Mr. Britling Sees It Through, Bk. 1, ch. 2, sect. 2 (1916)

• “Since the passing of Victoria the Great there had been an accumulating uneasiness in the national life. It was as if some compact and dignified paper-weight had been lifted from people's ideas, and as if at once they had begun to blow about anyhow.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Soul of a Bishop (1917)

• “Humanity either makes, or breeds, or tolerates all its afflictions, great or small.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1918 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Joan and Peter: The Story of an Education (1918)

• “We want a common law for Africa, a general Declaration of Rights, of certain elementary rights, and we want a common authority to which the black man and the native tribe may appeal for justice.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1918 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: In The Fourth Year (1918)

• “A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1921 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Salvaging of Civilization (1921)

• “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.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1923 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: On the British government's decision to build the Singapore Naval Base, in an article for the Westminster Gazette (13 October 1923)

• “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.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1928 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Way the World is Going, (1928)

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

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1929 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Temptaion of Harringay (1929)

• “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.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1931 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind, Ch. 11 (1931)

• “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.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1929 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: What I Believe", The Listener, 1929. Quoted in Clifton Fadiman, I Believe, London, George Allen and Unwin, 1940.

• “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.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Stalin-Wells Talk: The Verbatim Report and A Discussion”, G.B. Shaw, J.M. Keynes et al., London, The New Statesman and Nation, (1934) p. 19

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

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Stalin-Wells Talk: The Verbatim Report and A Discussion, G.B. Shaw, J.M. Keynes et al., London, The New Statesman and Nation, (1934) p. 5

• “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.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Stalin-Wells Talk: The Verbatim Report and A Discussion”, G.B. Shaw, J.M. Keynes et al., London, The New Statesman and Nation, (1934) p. 15

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

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: An Experiment in Autobiography (1934)

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

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: It seems to me that I am more to the Left than you, Mr. Stalin,” New Statesman (Oct. 27, 1934)

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

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1935 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: 1935 speech at Barber's Hall, London, included in Round the World for Birth Control (1937) edited by the Birth Control International Information Centre

• “If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Anatomy of Frustration (1936)

• “Marguerite, joyfully: “We are ourselves, my dear, we are ourselves. Well never be anyone else.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The New Faust (in Nash's Pall Magazine, December 1936 – adaptation of "The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham")

• “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.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1937 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Informative Content of Education Speech given at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Nottingham, England on 2 September 1937

• “The New Deal is plainly an attempt to achieve a working socialism and avert a social collapse in America; it is extraordinarily parallel to the successive "policies" and "Plans" of the Russian experiment. Americans shirk the word "socialism", but what else can one call it?”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The New World Order (1939)

• “Mankind which began in a cave and behind a windbreak will end in the disease-soaked ruins of a slum.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Fate of Man, ch. 26 (1939)

• “Everywhere war and monstrous economic exploitation are intensified, so that those very same increments of power and opportunity which have brought mankind within sight of an age of limitless plenty seem likely to be lost again, and, it may be, lost for ever, in a chaotic and irremediable social collapse. It becomes clear that a unified political, economic and social order can alone put an end to these national and private appropriations that now waste the mighty possibilities of our time.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1215 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Introduction to the Declaration of the Rights of Man", in The Common Sense of War and Peace : World Revolution or War Unending. London, Penguin Books, 1940. Quoted in Benn,Tony, Writings on the Wall : A Radical and Soci…

• “The crisis of yesterday is the joke of to-morrow.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1941 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: You Can't be Too Careful (1941)

• “These are the rights of all human beings. They are yours wherever you are. Demand that your rulers and politicians sign and observe this declaration. If they refuse, if they quibble, they can have no place in the new free world that dawns upon mankind.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1942 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Rights of the World Citizen (1942); a revised edition of The Rights of Man

• “I have remarked, in the course of such air travel as I have done, that the airmen of all nations have a common resemblance to each other and that the patriotic virus in their blood is largely corrected by a wider professionalism.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1942 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Outlook for Homo Sapiens (1942)

• “Heresies are experiments in man's unsatisfied search for truth.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1943 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Crux Ansata: An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church (1943)

• “If his thinking has been sound, then this world is at the end of its tether. The end of everything we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Mind at the End of its Tether (1945), p. 1

• “Adapt or perish, now as ever, is Nature's inexorable imperative.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Mind at the End of its Tether (1945), p. 19

• “The young are life, and there is no hope but in them.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Mind at the End of its Tether (1945), p. 28

• “The old men behave for the most part meanly and disgustingly, and the young are spasmodic, foolish and all too easily misled.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Mind at the End of its Tether (1945), p. 30

• “There comes a moment in the day when you have written your pages in the morning, attended to your correspondence in the afternoon, and have nothing further to do. Then comes that hour when you are bored; that's the time for sex.”

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Quoted in Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography (1964)

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