H. G. Wells

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
– H. G. Wells

Advertising is legalized lying.
– H. G. Wells

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was
being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his
own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and
studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the
transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency
men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of
their empire over matter.
– H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

Our true nationality is mankind.
– H. G. Wells

To grow and still to grow, that is the law of life. What other law can there be?
– H. G. Wells

The path of least resistance is the path of the loser.
– H. G. Wells

We must not allow the clock and the calendar to blind us to the fact that each moment of
life is a miracle and mystery.
– H. G. Wells

A time will come when a politician who has wilfully 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 pay with their own.
– H. G. Wells

Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe
swims.
– H. G. Wells

If we don’t end war, war will end us.
– H. G. Wells

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

Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth
is the greatest weapon we have.
– H. G. Wells

What on earth would a man do with himself, if something did not stand in his way?
– H. G. Wells

Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.
– H. G. Wells

Great and little cannot understand one another… But in every child born of man, lurks some
seed of greatness.
– H. G. Wells

Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no
intelligence where there is no need of change.
– H. G. Wells

Science has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use. It is time she held her hand.
– H. G. Wells

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

Cynicism is humour in ill health.
– H. G. Wells

It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that
is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all the human
mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening.
– H. G. Wells

An artist who theorizes about his work is no longer artist but critic.
– H. G. Wells

Affliction comes to us, not to make us sad but sober; not to make us sorry but wise.
– H. G. Wells

Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness.
– H. G. Wells

We do not want dictators, we do not want oligarchic parties or class rule, we want a
widespread world intelligence conscious of itself.
– H. G. Wells

In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
– 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

While there is a chance of the world getting through its troubles, I hold that a reasonable
man has to behave as though he were sure of it. If at the end your cheerfulness is not
justified, at any rate you will have been cheerful.
– H. G. Wells

An animal may be ferocious and cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie.
– H. G. Wells

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.
– H. G. Wells

Beauty is in the heart of the beholder.
– H. G. Wells

The science hangs like a gathering fog in a valley, a fog which begins nowhere and goes
nowhere, an incidental, unmeaning inconvenience to passers-by.
– H. G. Wells

Heresies are experiments in man’s unsatisfied search for truth.
– H. G. Wells

The Buddha is nearer to us. You see clearly a man, simple, devout, lonely, battling for light, a
vivid human personality, not a myth. Beneath a mass of miraculous fable I feel that there also
was a man. He too, gave a message to mankind universal in its character. Many of our best
modern ideas are in closest harmony with it. All the miseries and discontents of life are due,
he taught, to selfishness. Selfishness takes three forms – one, the desire to satisfy the
senses; second, the craving for immortality; and the third the desire for prosperity and
worldliness. Before a man can become serene he must cease to live for his senses or himself.
Then he merges into a greater being. Buddha in a different language called men to
self-forgetfulness five hundred years before Christ. In some ways he was near to us and our
needs. Buddha was more lucid upon our individual importance in service than Christ, and less
ambiguous upon the question of personal immortality.
– H. G. Wells

Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State’s failure, all crime in the end is the crime of
the community.
– H. G. Wells

Man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of nature, and more and more does he turn
himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him.
– H. G. Wells

If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.
– H. G. Wells

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.
– H. G. Wells

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.
– H. G. Wells

It may be that we exist and cease to exist in alternations, like the minute dots in some forms
of toned printing or the succession of pictures on a cinema film. It may be that reality is an
illusion of movement in an eternal, static, multidimensional universe. We may be only a story
written on the ground of the inconceivable; the pattern on a rug beneath the feet of the
incomprehensible.
– H. G. Wells

How small the vastest of human catastrophes may seem at a distance of a few million miles.
– H. G. Wells

Losing your way on a journey is unfortunate. But, losing your reason for the journey is a fate
more cruel.
– H. G. Wells

The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.
– H. G. Wells

There is, though I do not know how there is or why there is, a sense of infinite peace and
protection in the glittering hosts of heaven.
– H. G. Wells

After people have repeated a phrase a great number of times, they begin to realize it has
meaning and may even be true.
– H. G. Wells

What really matters is what you do with what you have.
– H. G. Wells

Sometimes, you have to step outside of the person you’ve been and remember the person
you were meant to be. The person you want to be. The person you are.
– H. G. Wells

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

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.
– H. G. Wells

States organized for war will make war as surely as hens will lay eggs.
– H. G. Wells

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

Human history is in essence a history of ideas.
– H. G. Wells

All men, however highly educated, retain some superstitious inklings.
– H. G. Wells

Leaders should lead as far as they can and then vanish. Their ashes should not choke the fire
they have lit.
– H. G. Wells

One of the darkest evils of our world is surely the unteachable wildness of the good.
– H. G. Wells

Humanity either makes, or breeds, or tolerates all its afflictions, great or small.
– H. G. Wells

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.
– H. G. Wells

We all have our time machines, don’t we? Those that take us back are memories. And those
that carry us forward, are dreams.
– H. G. Wells

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.
– H. G. Wells

Biologically the species is the accumulation of the experiments of all its successful individuals
since the beginning.
– H. G. Wells

The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature.
– H. G. Wells

If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: Attack it at an hour when it
isn’t expecting it.
– H. G. Wells

You have learned something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.
– H. G. Wells

It’s no use locking the door after the steed is stolen.
– 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

Find the thing you want to do most intensely, make sure that’s it, and do it with all your might.
If you live, well and good. If you die, well and good. Your purpose is done.
– H. G. Wells

The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow.
– H. G. Wells

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