Top 450 H. G. Wells Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 10 of 10

451. “Man is now a new animal, a new and different animal; he can jump a hundred miles, see through brick walls, bombard atoms, analyse the stars, set about his business with the strength of a million horses. And so forth and so on. Yes. Yes. But all the same he goes on behaving like the weak little needy ape he used to be. He grabs, snarls, quarrels, fears, stampedes, and plays in his immense powder magazine until he seems likely to blow up the whole damned show.”

— H. G. Wells

452. “But by that time Lady Harman had acquired the habit of reading and the habit of thinking over what she read, and from that it is an easy step to thinking over oneself and the circumstances of one’s own life. The one thing trains for the other.”

— H. G. Wells

453. “It is all one spectacle of forces running to waste, of people who use and do not replace, the story of a country hectic with a wasting aimless fever of trade and money-making and pleasure-seeking.”

— H. G. Wells

454. “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

455. “Three-Dimensional representations of his Four-Dimensioned being, which is a fixed and unalterable thing.”

— H. G. Wells

456. “Have you been time travelling?”

— H. G. Wells

457. “When, 200 years ago, the political center of the United States was transferred from Washington to Centropolis, the newspaper followed the government and assumed the name of Earth Chronicle.”

— H. G. Wells

458. “The worst of all things that haunt poor mortal men,” said I; “and that is, in all its nakedness – ‘Fear!’ Fear that will not have light or sound, that will not bear with reason, that deafens and darkens and overwhelms.”

— H. G. Wells

459. “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 stake their own.”

— H. G. Wells

460. “And through it all, this destiny was before me,” he said; “this vast inheritance of which I did not dream.”

— H. G. Wells

461. “He seemed under a chronic irritation of the greatest intensity. His habit of talking to himself in a low voice grew steadily upon him, but though Mrs. Hall listened conscientiously she could make neither head nor tail of what she heard.”

— H. G. Wells

462. “Presently he added to himself the power of the horse and the ox, he borrowed the carrying strength of water and the driving force of the wind, he quickened his fire by blowing, and his simple tools, pointed first with copper and then with iron, increased and varied.”

— H. G. Wells

463. “We are to turn our backs for a space upon the insistent examination of the thing that is, and face towards the freer air, the ampler spaces of the thing that perhaps might be.”

— H. G. Wells

464. “Then suddenly the humour of the situation came into my mind: the thought of the years I had spent in study and toil to get into the future age, and now my passion of anxiety to get out of it.”

— H. G. Wells

465. “He was certainly an intensely egotistical and unfeeling man, but the sight of his victim, his first victim, bloody and pitiful at his feet, may have released some long pent fountain of remorse which for a time may have flooded whatever scheme of action he had contrived.”

— H. G. Wells

466. “There is only one sort of man who is absolutely to blame for his own misery, and that is the man who finds life dull and dreary.”

— H. G. Wells

467. “I surveyed the broad view of our old world under the sunset of that long day.”

— H. G. Wells

468. “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

469. “Nowhere in the world, Rud reflected, was journalism anything but a malignant and wanton power. Later on, as the Common-sense Movement grew, he had to think a lot about that. He had to spread a new system of ideas throughout the world, and journalism would neither instruct nor inform nor lend itself consistently to any sustained propaganda.”

— H. G. Wells

470. “Down the mountain we shall go and down the passes, and as the valleys open the world will open, Utopia, where men and women are happy and laws are wise, and where all that is tangled and confused in human affairs has been unravelled and made right.”

— H. G. Wells

471. “As night goes round the Earth always there are hundreds of thousands of people who should be sleeping, lying awake, fearing a bully, fearing a cruel competition, dreading lest they cannot make good, ill of some illness they cannot comprehend, distressed by some irrational quarrel, maddened by some thwarted instinct or some suppressed perverted desire.”

— H. G. Wells

472. “The only path of escape he could conceive as yet for Lady Harman lay through the chivalry of some other man. That a woman could possibly rebel against one man without the sympathy and moral maintenance of another was still outside the range of Mr. Brumley’s understanding. It is still outside the range of most men’s understandings – and of a great many women’s.”

— H. G. Wells

473. “The passion for playing chess is one of the most unaccountable in the world. It slaps the theory of natural selection in the face. It is the most absorbing of occupations. The least satisfying of desires. A nameless excrescence upon life. It annihilates a man. You have, let us say, a promising politician, a rising artist that you wish to destroy. Dagger or bomb are archaic and unreliable – but teach him, inoculate him with chess.”

— H. G. Wells

474. “It’s a pity they make themselves so unapproachable,′ he said. ‘It would be curious to know how they live on another planet, we might learn a thing or two.”

— H. G. Wells

475. “It was all a monstrous payment for courageous fiction, a gratuity in return for the one reality of human life – illusion. We gave them a feeling of hope and profit; we sent a tidal wave of water and confidence into their stranded affairs... Civilization is possible only through confidence, so that we can bank our money and go unarmed about the streets.”

— H. G. Wells

476. “It’s chance, I tell you,′ he interrupted, ′ as everything is in a man’s life.”

— H. G. Wells

477. “Think of the men who have walked here!” said a tourist in the Roman Coliseum. It was a Futurist mind that answered: “Think of the men who will.”

— H. G. Wells

478. “Why did every human concern clog itself up in a tangle of routines, formalities, disciplines, imperatives? Why couldn’t one be free? Really free? Guarding one’s freedom, wasn’t freedom at all. Why couldn’t one win one’s freedom for good and all, and get on with life?”

— H. G. Wells

479. “When we’ve got a common philosophy and a common objective; then we can advance in open order. We shall be a great team. But we’ve got to make sure of that common set of ideas. Maybe we shall find our formulae difficult for some of these new types. If we keep our minds open, we may find that they are right and that our formulae have to be modified. Probably – it’s a thought that shouldn’t dishearten us – but probably we don’t know everything.”

— H. G. Wells

480. “She had never been out of England before, she would rather die than trust herself friendless in a foreign country, and so forth. She seemed, poor woman, to imagine that the French and the Martians might prove very similar.”

— H. G. Wells

481. “When we think of readapting mankind to a world of unity and co-operation, we have to consider that practically all the educational machinery on earth, is still in the hands of God-selling or Marx-selling combines. Everywhere in close co-operation with our nationalist governments, the oil and steel interests, our drug salesmanship, and so forth, the hirelines of these huge religious concerns, with more or less zeal and loyalty, are selling destruction to mankind.”

— H. G. Wells

482. “There are kisses and kisses, I am told, and this must have been quite the other sort from Millie’s resonant signals of regard.”

— H. G. Wells

483. “It’s like that with some people,′ he said; ’whenever I got into the examination-room or anywhere everything seemed to go.”

— H. G. Wells

484. “Love is not only the cardinal fact in the individual life, but the most important concern of the community; after all, the way in which the young people of this generation pair off determines the fate of the nation; all the other affairs of the state are subsidiary to that. And we leave it to flushed and blundering youth to stumble on its own significance, with nothing to guide it but shocked looks and sentimental twaddle and base whisperings and cant-smeared examples.”

— H. G. Wells

485. “By ten o’clock the police organisation, and by midday even the railway organisations, were losing coherency, losing shape and efficiency, guttering, softening, running at last in that swift liquefaction of the social body.”

— H. G. Wells

486. “I had made myself the most complicated and the most hopeless trap that ever a man devised.”

— H. G. Wells

487. “And scattered about it, some in their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling-machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the Martians – dead! – slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.”

— H. G. Wells

488. “But wait until to-morrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning.”

— H. G. Wells

489. “Here was the same beautiful scene, the same abundant foliage, the same splendid palaces and magnificent ruins, the same silver river running between its fertile banks.”

— H. G. Wells

490. “Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness. Even in our own time certain tendencies and desires, once necessary to survival, are a constant source of failure.”

— H. G. Wells

491. “Big iron upperworks rose out of this headlong structure, and from that twin funnels projected and spat a smoking blast shot with fire. It was the torpedo ram, Thunder Child, steaming headlong, coming to the rescue.”

— H. G. Wells

492. “After a lapse of fifteen years he rediscovered this interesting world, about which so many people go incredibly blind and bored.”

— H. G. Wells

493. “The tame ones will go like all tame beasts; in a few generations they’ll be big, beautiful, rich-blooded, stupid – rubbish!”

— H. G. Wells

494. “There are occasions when a moralising novelist can merely wring his hands and leave matters to take their course.”

— H. G. Wells

495. “Deep in the being of Mr. Polly, deep in that darkness, like a creature which has been beaten about the head and left for dead but still lives, crawled a persuasion that over and above the things that are jolly and “bits of all right,” there was beauty, there was delight; that somewhere – magically inaccessible perhaps, but still somewhere – were pure and easy and joyous states of body and mind.”

— H. G. Wells