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H. G. Wells

165 quotes

“That, I believe, was the very first time that the words Tono-Bungay ever heard on earth—unless my uncle indulged in monologues in his chamber—a highly probable thing. Its utterance certainly did not seem to me at the time to mark any sort of epoch, and had I been told this word was the Open Sesame to whatever pride and pleasure the grimy front of London hid from us that evening, I should have laughed aloud.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The atomic bomb had dwarfed the international issues to complete insignificance. When our minds wandered from the preoccupations of our immediate needs, we speculated upon the possibility of stopping the use of these frightful explosives before the world was utterly destroyed. For to us it seemed quite plain that these bombs and the still greater power of destruction of which they were the precursors might quite easily shatter every relationship and institution of mankind... war must end and that the only way to end war was to have but one government for mankind.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, which was the main teaching of Jesus, is certainly one of the most revolutionary doctrines that ever stirred and changed human thought.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“From 1789 to late in 1791 the French Revolution was an orderly process, and from the summer of 1794 the Republic was an orderly and victorious state. The Terror was not the work of the whole country, but of the town mob which owed its existence and its savagery to the misrule, and social injustice of the ancient regime...More lives were wasted by the British generals alone on the opening day of what is known as the Somme offensive of July, 1916 than in the whole French Revolution from start to finish.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The professional military mind is by necessity an inferior and unimaginative mind; no man of high intellectual quality would willingly imprison his gifts in such a calling.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Human history is in essence a history of ideas.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every one of these hundreds of millions of human beings is in some form seeking happiness...Not one is altogether noble nor altogether trustworthy nor altogether consistent; and not one is altogether vile...Not a single one but has at some time wept.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our true nationality is mankind.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe... Yet, clumsily or smoothly, the world, it seems, progresses and will progress.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life begins perpetually. Gathered together at last under the leadership of man, the student-teacher of the universe... unified, disciplined, armed with the secret powers of the atom, and with knowledge as yet beyond dreaming, Life, forever dying to be born afresh, forever young and eager, will presently stand upon this earth as upon a footstool, and stretch out its realm amidst the stars.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The weaving of mankind into one community does not imply the creation of a homogeneous community, but rather the reverse; the welcome and adequate utilization of distinctive quality in an atmosphere of understanding... Communities all to one pattern, like boxes of toy soldiers, are things of the past, rather than of the future.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A time when all such good things will be for all men may be coming more nearly than we think. Each one who believes that brings the good time nearer; each heart that fails delays it.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The history of India for many centuries had been happier, less fierce, and more dreamlike than any other history. In these favorable conditions, they built a character - meditative and peaceful and a "nation of philosophers such as could nowhere have existed except in India".”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As Quoted and attributed in Londhe, S. (2008). A tribute to Hinduism: Thoughts and wisdom spanning continents and time about India and her culture
“Man is an imperfect animal and never quite trustworthy in the dark.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Oswald Cabal: Dragging out life to the last possible second is not living to the best effect. The nearer the bone, the sweeter the meat. The best of life, Passworthy, lies nearest to the edge of death.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Rowena: I don't suppose any man has ever understood any woman since the beginning of things. You don't understand our imaginations, how wild our imaginations can be.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Boss: You are not mechanics, you are warriors. You have been trained, not to think, but to do.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Boss: The State's your mother, your father, the totality of your interests. No discipline can be too severe for the man that denies that by word or deed.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Rowena: You've got the subtlety of a bullfrog.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Oswald Cabal: There's nothing wrong in suffering, if you suffer for a purpose. Our revolution didn't abolish danger or death. It simply made danger and death worthwhile.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Pippa' Passworthy: This little upset across the water doesn't mean anything. Threatened men live long and threatened wars never occur.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“John Cabal: If we don't end war, war will end us.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Raymond Passworthy: Oh, God, is there ever to be any age of happiness? Is there never to be any rest?”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Oswald Cabal: Rest enough for the individual man, too much and too soon, and we call it death. But for Man, no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First, this little planet and its winds and ways. And then all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about him, and, at last, out across immensity to the stars. And when he has conquered all the depths of space, and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning...”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Raymond Passworthy: But... we're such little creatures. Poor humanity's so fragile, so weak. Little... little animals.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Oswald Cabal: Little animals. And if we're no more than animals, we must snatch each little scrap of happiness, and live, and suffer, and pass, mattering no more than all the other animals do or have done. It is this, or that. All the universe or nothing. Which shall it be, Passworthy? Which shall it be?”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There has been ... an enormous waste of human mental and physical resources in premature revolutionary thrusts, ill-planned, dogmatic, essentially unscientific reconstructions and restorations of the social order, during the past hundred years. This was the inevitable first result of the discrediting of those old and superseded mental adaptations which were embodied in the institutions and education of the past. They discredited themselves and left the world full of problems.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We do not want dictators, we do not want oligarchic parties or class rule, we want a widespread world intelligence conscious of itself. To work out a way to that world brain organization is therefore our primary need in this age of imperative construction.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...there has accumulated a vast tangle of emergency legislation, regulations, barriers and restraints, out of all proportion to and often missing and distorting the needs of the situation. For the restoration and modernisation of human civilization, this exaggerated outlawing of the fellow citizen whom we see fit to suspect as a traitor or revolutionary and also of the stranger within our gates, has to be restrained and brought back within the scheme of human rights.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mr. Duff Cooper, landing at New York, cools his mind by blowing off about a forthcoming revolt of the German Army and a return to monarchy in Germany, a Holy Roman Empire, I suppose, leading that new Crusade of which the Pope has been talking about recent against anti-God Russia. But quite a lot of radical people in the world, in spite of the folly, stupidity and brutality of the Stalin–Molotov attack on Finland, are averse from this idea of a religious war against Socialism and Atheism.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every man shall be entitled to a sound and objective education and there shall be genuine equality of opportunity. Education shall be a matter of environment as well as of instruction, and everyone shall be entitled to an education untouched by the interests of any party or religion.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And here one may note a curious comparison which can be made between this [ascidian] life-history and that of many a respectable pinnacle and gargoyle on the social fabric. Every respectable citizen of the professional classes passes through a period of activity and imagination, of "liveliness and eccentricity," of "Sturm und Drang." He shocks his aunts. Presently, however, he realizes the sober aspect of things. He becomes dull; he enters a profession; suckers appear on his head; and he studies. Finally, by virtue of these he settles down—he marries. All his wild ambitions and subtle æsthetic perceptions atrophy as needless in the presence of calm domesticity. He secretes a house, or "establishment," round himself, of inorganic and servile material. His Bohemian tail is discarded. Henceforth his life is a passive receptivity to what chance and the drift of his profession bring along; he lives an almost entirely vegetative excrescence on the side of a street, and in the tranquillity of his calling finds that colourless contentment that replaces happiness.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1891 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Zoological Retrogression (1891)
“Now I am prepared to maintain," said Chaffery, proceeding with his proposition, "that Honesty is essentially an anarchistic and disintegrating force in society, that communities are held together and the progress of civilisation made possible only by vigorous and sometimes even violent Lying; that the Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie to and humbug themselves and one another for the general Good. Lies are the mortar that bind the savage individual man into the social masonry … Were I not of a profoundly indolent, restless, adventurous nature, and horribly averse to writing, I would make a great book of this and live honored by every profound duffer in the world.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1899 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Love and Mr Lewisham (1899), Ch. 23
“Money and credit are as much human contrivances as bicycles, and as liable to expansion and modification as any other sort of prevalent but imperfect machine. And how will the new republic treat the inferior races? How will it deal with the black? how will it deal with the yellow man? how will it tackle that alleged termite in the civilized woodwork, the Jew? Certainly not as races at all. It will aim to establish, and it will at last, though probably only after a second century has passed, establish a world state with a common language and a common rule. All over the world its roads, its standards, its laws, and its apparatus of control will run. It will, I have said, make the multiplication of those who fall behind a certain standard of social efficiency unpleasant and difficult... The Jew will probably lose much of his particularism, intermarry with Gentiles, and cease to be a physically distinct element in human affairs in a century or so. But much of his moral tradition will, I hope, never die. ... And for the rest, those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency? Well, the world is a world, not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go.The whole tenor and meaning of the world, as I see it, is that they have to go. So far as they fail to develop sane, vigorous, and distinctive personalities for the great world of the future, it is their portion to die out and disappear. The world has a greater purpose than happiness; our lives are to serve God's purpose, and that purpose aims not at man as an end, but works through him to greater issues.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1901 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought (1901), The Faith, Morals, and Public Policy of The New Republic, pp. 340–343
“This Prussian Imperialism has been for forty years an intolerable nuisance in the earth. Ever since the crushing of the French in 1871 the evil thing has grown and cast its spreading shadow over Europe. Germany has preached a propaganda of ruthless force and political materialism to the whole uneasy world. “Blood and iron,” she boasted, was the cement of her unity, and almost as openly the little, mean, aggressive statesmen and professors who have guided her destinies to this present conflict have professed cynicism and an utter disregard of any ends but nationally selfish ends, as though it were religion. Evil just as much as good may be made into a Cant. Physical and moral brutality has indeed become a cant in the German mind, and spread from Germany throughout the world. I could wish it were possible to say that English and American thought had altogether escaped its corruption. But now at last we shake ourselves free and turn upon this boasting wickedness to rid the world of it. The whole world is tired of it. And “Gott!”—Gott so perpetually invoked—Gott indeed must be very tired of it.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1914 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: ‘Why Britain Went to War’, The War Illustrated (10 August 1914), quoted in The War Illustrated Album de Luxe; The Story of the Great European War told by Camera, Pen and Pencil, ed. J. A. Hammerton (1915), p. 10
“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?”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1933 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Open Conspiracy (1933)
“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.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: An Experiment in Autobiography (1934)
“The fact that I regarded myself as a complete outsider in public affairs, and that I felt debarred from any such conformity as would have given me a career within the established political and educational machinery, probably helped importantly in the liberation of my mind to these realizations, and supplied the disinterested vigour with which I worked them out. I could attack electoral and parliamentary methods, the prestige of the universities and the ruling class, the monarchy and patriotism, because I had not the slightest hope or intention of ever using any of these established systems for my own advancement or protection. For a scientific treatment of the theory of government my political handicap was a release. I had the liberty of that irresponsible child in the fable of the Emperor’s Clothes. I could say exactly what I thought because it was inconceivable that I could ever be a successful courtier.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: An Experiment in Autobiography - Chapter the Ninth : The Idea of a Planned World (1934). Also quoted in "Appendix G: Wells on Class and Society" in The Invisible Man, edited by Nicole Lobdell and Nancee Reeves, Broadvie…
“We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century - for several centuries. The three or four years' course of lectures, the bachelor who knows some, the master who knows most, the doctor who knows all, are ideas that have come down unimpaired from the Middle Ages. Nowadays no one should end his learning while he lives and these university degrees are preposterous. It is true that we have multiplied universities greatly in the past hundred years, but we seem to have multiplied them altogether too much upon the old pattern. . [A] new university is just another imitation of all the old universities that have ever been. Educationally we are still for all practical purposes in the coach and horse and galley stage.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) first seen 1938 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: World Brain (1938)
“[The Jesuits'] work had to be propaganda; teaching and the insinuation by every possible means of the authority and policy of the Church.... Unfortunately for the world the Jesuits have never been able to keep clear of politics. It was against their written professions, if these are to be taken seriously, but it was manifestly among their inevitable temptations. They had their share, direct and indirect, in embroiling states, concocting conspiracies and kindling wars.... We need not expand this indictment further. Almost every country in Europe except England had at one time or another been provoked to expel the Jesuits, and ... their obdurate persistence in evil-doing continues to this day.”
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)
“But," said I, "these things—these animals talk!"He said that was so, and proceeded to point out that the possibility of vivisection does not stop at a mere physical metamorphosis. A pig may be educated. The mental structure is even less determinate than the bodily. In our growing science of hypnotism we find the promise of a possibility of superseding old inherent instincts by new suggestions, grafting upon or replacing the inherited fixed ideas. Very much indeed of what we call moral education, he said, is such an artificial modification and perversion of instinct; pugnacity is trained into courageous self-sacrifice, and suppressed sexuality into religious emotion.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Pain is simply our intrinsic medical adviser to warn us and stimulate us. Not all living flesh is painful; nor is all nerve, not even all sensory nerve. There’s no taint of pain, real pain, in the sensations of the optic nerve. If you wound the optic nerve, you merely see flashes of light, — just as disease of the auditory nerve merely means a humming in our ears. Plants do not feel pain, nor the lower animals; it’s possible that such animals as the starfish and crayfish do not feel pain at all. Then with men, the more intelligent they become, the more intelligently they will see after their own welfare, and the less they will need the goad to keep them out of danger. I never yet heard of a useless thing that was not ground out of existence by evolution sooner or later. Did you? And pain gets needless.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Then I am a religious man, Prendick, as every sane man must be. It may be, I fancy, that I have seen more of the ways of this world's Maker than you — for I have sought his laws, in my way, all my life, while you, I understand, have been collecting butterflies. And I tell you, pleasure and pain have nothing to do with heaven or hell. Pleasure and pain — bah! What is your theologian's ecstasy but Mahomet's houri in the dark? This store which men and women set on pleasure and pain, Prendick, is the mark of the beast upon them, the mark of the beast from which they came! Pain, pain and pleasure, they are for us only so long as we wriggle in the dust.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is a kind of travesty of humanity over there. Montgomery knows about it, for he interferes in their affairs. He has trained one or two of them to our service. He's ashamed of it, but I believe he half likes some of those beasts. It's his business, not mine. They only sicken me with a sense of failure. I take no interest in them. I fancy they follow in the lines the Kanaka missionary marked out, and have a kind of mockery of a rational life, poor beasts! There's something they call the Law. Sing hymns about ‘all thine.’ They build themselves their dens, gather fruit, and pull herbs — marry even. But I can see through it all, see into their very souls, and see there nothing but the souls of beasts, beasts that perish, anger and the lusts to live and gratify themselves. — Yet they're odd; complex, like everything else alive. There is a kind of upward striving in them, part vanity, part waste sexual emotion, part waste curiosity. It only mocks me.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I say I became habituated to the Beast People, that a thousand things which had seemed unnatural and repulsive speedily became natural and ordinary to me. I suppose everything in existence takes its colour from the average hue of our surroundings. Montgomery and Moreau were too peculiar and individual to keep my general impressions of humanity well defined. I would see one of the clumsy bovine-creatures who worked the launch, treading heavily through the undergrowth, and find myself asking, trying hard to recall, how he differed from some really human yokel trudging home from his mechanical labours; or I would meet the Fox-Bear Woman's vulpine, shifty face, strangely human in its speculative cunning, and even imagine I had met it before in some city byway.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I had to act with the utmost circumspection to save myself from the suspicion of insanity. My memory of the Law, of the two dead sailors, of the ambuscades of the darkness, of the body in the canebrake, haunted me; and, unnatural as it seems, with my return to mankind came, instead of that confidence and sympathy I had expected, a strange enhancement of the uncertainty and dread I had experienced during my stay upon the island. No one would believe me; I was almost as queer to men as I had been to the Beast People. I may have caught something of the natural wildness of my companions. They say that terror is a disease, and anyhow I can witness that for several years now a restless fear has dwelt in my mind, such a restless fear as a half-tamed lion cub may feel.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...I do not expect that the terror of that island will ever altogether leave me. At most times it lies far in the back of my mind, a mere distant cloud, a memory, and a faint distrust; but there are times when the little cloud spreads until it obscures the whole sky. Then I look about me at my fellow men; and I go in fear. I see faces, keen and bright; others, dull or dangerous; others, unsteady, insincere; none that have the calm authority of a reasonable soul. I feel as though the animal was surging up through them; that presently the degradation of the Islanders will be played over again on a larger scale. I know this is an illusion, that these seeming men and women about me are indeed men and women, men and women for ever, perfectly reasonable creatures, full of human desires and tender solicitude, emancipated from instinct and the slaves of no fantastic Law — beings altogether different from the Beast Folk. Yet I shrink from them, from their curious glances, their inquiries and assistance, and long to be away from them and alone.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You don't understand," he said, "who I am or what I am. I'll show you. By Heaven! I'll show you." Then he put his open palm over his face and withdrew it. The centre of his face became a black cavity. "Here," he said. He stepped forward and handed Mrs. Hall something which she, staring at his metamorphosed face, accepted automatically. Then, when she saw what it was, she screamed loudly, dropped it, and staggered back. The nose—it was the stranger's nose! pink and shining—rolled on the floor.Then he removed his spectacles, and everyone in the bar gasped. He took off his hat, and with a violent gesture tore at his whiskers and bandages. For a moment they resisted him. A flash of horrible anticipation passed through the bar. "Oh, my Gard!" said some one. Then off they came.It was worse than anything. Mrs. Hall, standing open-mouthed and horror-struck, shrieked at what she saw, and made for the door of the house. Everyone began to move. They were prepared for scars, disfigurements, tangible horrors, but nothing! The bandages and false hair flew across the passage into the bar, making a hobbledehoy jump to avoid them. Everyone tumbled on everyone else down the steps. For the man who stood there shouting some incoherent explanation, was a solid gesticulating figure up to the coat-collar of him, and then—nothingness, no visible thing at all!”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why!" said Huxter, suddenly, "that's not a man at all. It's just empty clothes. Look! You can see down his collar and the linings of his clothes. I could put my arm—"He extended his hand; it seemed to meet something in mid-air, and he drew it back with a sharp exclamation. "I wish you'd keep your fingers out of my eye," said the aerial voice, in a tone of savage expostulation. "The fact is, I'm all here: head, hands, legs, and all the rest of it, but it happens I'm invisible. It's a confounded nuisance, but I am. That's no reason why I should be poked to pieces by every stupid bumpkin in Iping, is it?”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I remember that night. It was late at night—in the daytime one was bothered with the gaping, silly students—and I worked then sometimes till dawn. It came suddenly, splendid and complete in my mind. I was alone; the laboratory was still, with the tall lights burning brightly and silently. In all my great moments I have been alone. 'One could make an animal—a tissue—transparent! One could make it invisible! All except the pigments—I could be invisible!' I said, suddenly realising what it meant to be an albino with such knowledge. It was overwhelming. I left the filtering I was doing, and went and stared out of the great window at the stars. 'I could be invisible!' I repeated.To do such a thing would be to transcend magic. And I beheld, unclouded by doubt, a magnificent vision of all that invisibility might mean to a man—the mystery, the power, the freedom. Drawbacks I saw none.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source