Top 450 H. G. Wells Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “It doesn’t follow that a nasty habit of mind is any less nasty because it’s ancestral. It doesn’t follow you can’t cure it. Why scratch fleas for ever? Gambling, speculation, is a social disease. It’s as natural and desirable as – syphilis...”

— H. G. Wells

402. “Another of those fools,” said Dr. Kemp. “Like that ass who ran into me this morning round a corner, with the ‘’Visible Man a-coming, sir!’ I can’t imagine what possess people. One might think we were in the thirteenth century.”

— H. G. Wells

403. “There is very little deliberate wickedness in the world. The stupidity of our selfishness gives much the same results indeed, but in the ethical laboratory it shows a different nature.”

— H. G. Wells

404. “Bah! The thing is not a nose at all, but a bit of primordial chaos clapped on to my face.”

— H. G. Wells

405. “The stranger swore briefly but vividly.”

— H. G. Wells

406. “Educate the Russian or the American or the Englishman or the Irishman or Frenchman or any real northern European except German, and you get the Anarchist, that is to say the man who dreams of order without organisation – of something beyond organisation...”

— H. G. Wells

407. “You are trying to do a more difficult thing than record folk songs; you are trying to record life.”

— H. G. Wells

408. “He liked to address every man in his own language, as a good European should.”

— H. G. Wells

409. “Life is two things. Life is morality – life is adventure. Squire and master. Adventure rules, and morality looks up the trains in the Bradshaw. Morality tells you what is right, and adventure moves you. If morality means anything it means keeping bounds, respecting implications, respecting implicit bounds. If individuality means anything it means breaking bounds – adventure.”

— H. G. Wells

410. “And in friendship and still more here, in this central business of love, accident rules it seems to me almost altogether. What personalities you will encounter in life, and have for a chief interest in life, is nearly as much a matter of chance as the drift of a grain of pollen in the pine forest. And once the light hazard has blown it has blown, never to drive again.”

— H. G. Wells

411. “It is good to stop by the track for a space, put aside the knapsack, wipe the brows, and talk a little of the upper slopes of the mountain we think we are climbing, would but the trees let us see it.”

— H. G. Wells

412. “For the most part people went about their business with an entirely irresponsible confidence in the stability of the universe.”

— H. G. Wells

413. “Think of what earthquakes and floods, wars and volcanoes, have done before men! Did you think God had exempted Weybridge? He is not an insurance agent.”

— H. G. Wells

414. “One of the darkest evils of our world is surely the unteachable wildness of the Good.”

— H. G. Wells

415. “A few minutes before, there had only been three real things before me – the immensity of the night and space and nature, my own feebleness and anguish, and the near approach of death.”

— H. G. Wells

416. “The man’s become inhuman, I tell you,” said Kemp. “I am as sure he will establish a reign of terror – so soon as he has got over the emotions of this escape – as I am sure I am talking to you. Our only chance is to be ahead. He has cut himself off from his kind. His blood be upon his own head.”

— H. G. Wells

417. “Wells recognized that these crude novels correctly foresaw modern warfare as aiming at the massive destruction of the physical structures of an enemy civilization and the terrorizing if not annihilating of its noncombatant population. His Martians anticipate with uncomfortable accuracy, for example, American bombings of Dresden and Tokyo, followed by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and boastful proclamations of “shock and awe” tactics against Iraq.”

— H. G. Wells

418. “They did not think politics was a great constructive process, they thought it was a kind of dog-fight. They wanted fun, they wanted spice, they wanted hits, they wanted also a chance to say “‘Ear, ‘ear!” in an intelligent and honourable manner and clap their hands and drum with their feet. The great constructive process in history gives so little scope for clapping and drumming and saying “‘Ear, ‘ear!” One might as well think of hounding on the solar system.”

— H. G. Wells

419. “As if there wasn’t a thousand things that were never heard.”

— H. G. Wells

420. “Language is the nourishment of the thought of man, that serves only as it undergoes metabolism, and becomes thought and lives, and in its very living passes away. You scientific people, with your fancy of a terrible exactitude in language, of indestructible foundations built, as that Wordsworthian doggerel on the title-page of Nature says, “for aye,” are marvellously without imagination!”

— H. G. Wells

421. “A boy is a creature of odd feelings.”

— H. G. Wells

422. “We’ve got to escape from narrowness. We’re a movement, not a conspiracy. We’ve got to radiate contacts, and have as many people aware of us as possible. That’s living, modern common sense.”

— H. G. Wells

423. “Better it is toward the right conduct of life to consider what will be the end of a thing, than what is the beginning of it: for what promises fair at first may prove ill, and what seems at first a disadvantage, may prove very advantageous.”

— H. G. Wells

424. “Within he felt that faint stirring of derision for the whole business of life which is the salt of the American mentality. Outwardly they are sentimental and enthusiastic and inwardly they are profoundly cynical.”

— H. G. Wells

425. “I had not, I said to myself, come into the future to carry on a miniature flirtation.”

— H. G. Wells

426. “Common sense and every material reality insisted upon the unification of human life throughout the planet and the socialisation of its elementary needs, and pitted against that was the fact that every authority, every institution, every established way of thinking and living was framed to preserve the advantages of the ruling and possessing minority and the separate sovereignty of the militant states that had been evolved within the vanished circumstances of the past.”

— H. G. Wells

427. “Particularly nauseous were the blank expressionless faces of people in trains and omnibuses; they seemed no more my fellow-creatures than dead bodies would be, so that I did not dare to travel unless I was assured of being alone.”

— H. G. Wells

428. “A biography should be a dissection and demonstration of how a particular human being was made and worked.”

— H. G. Wells

429. “Biologists can be just as sensitive to heresy as theologians.”

— H. G. Wells

430. “But in truth, a general prohibition in a state may increase the sum of liberty, and a general permission may diminish it. It does not follow, as these people would have us believe, that a man is more free where there is least law and more restricted where there is most law.”

— H. G. Wells

431. “We must be prepared to see an Association of Nations in conference growing into an organic system of world controls for world affairs and the keeping of the world’s peace, or we must be prepared for – a continuation of war.”

— H. G. Wells

432. “Had Moreau had any intelligible object, I could have sympathized at least a little with him. I am not so squeamish about pain as that. I could have forgiven him a little even, had his motive been only hate. But he was so irresponsible, so utterly careless! His curiosity, his mad, aimless investigations, drove him on; and the Things were thrown out to live a year or so, to struggle and blunder and suffer, and at last to die painfully.”

— H. G. Wells

433. “All we can do is to prepare for a universal language that will go on changing for ever. We don’t know everything. We aren’t final. I wish we could make that statement a part of the Fundamental Law.”

— H. G. Wells

434. “Looks to me like the sort of fellow one doesn’t play cards with.”

— H. G. Wells

435. “As mankind ‘matures,’ as it becomes more possible to be frank in the scrutiny of the self and others and in the publication of one’s findings, biography and autobiography will take the place of fiction for the investigation and discussion of character.”

— H. G. Wells

436. “In all the round world of Utopia there is no meat. There used to be. But now we cannot stand the thought of slaughter-houses. And, in a population that is all educated, and at about the same level of physical refinement, it is practically impossible to find anyone who will hew a dead ox or pig. We never settled the hygienic question of meat-eating at all. This other aspect decided us. I can still remember, as a boy, the rejoicings over the closing of the last slaughter-house.”

— H. G. Wells

437. “What was this place? – this place that to his senses seemed subtly quivering like a thing alive?”

— H. G. Wells

438. “Nobody read books, but women, parsons and idle people.”

— H. G. Wells

439. “This self-reliance, this direct dealing with the world, seemed to him, even in the height of his concern, unwomanly, a deeper injury to his own abandoned assumptions than any he had contemplated.”

— H. G. Wells

440. “In times of long established peace, when the tradition of generations has established the illusion of the profoundest human security, men’s minds are not greatly distressed by grotesqueness and absurdity in their political forms. It is all part of the humour and the good-humour of life. When one believes that all the tigers in the jungle are dead, it is quite amusing to walk along the jungle paths in a dressing-gown with a fan instead of a gun.”

— H. G. Wells

441. “I suppose I am fairly alert and interested in people, and that is my most attractive quality.”

— H. G. Wells

442. “There was no amazement, but only an impression of delightful rightness, of being reminded of happy things that had in some strange way been overlooked.”

— H. G. Wells

443. “In the night, he must have eaten and slept; for in the morning he was himself again, active, powerful, angry, and malignant, prepared for his last great struggle against the world.”

— H. G. Wells

444. “That won’t do,” said the policeman; “that’s murder.” “I know what country I’m in,” said the man with the beard. “I’m going to let off at his legs. Draw the bolts.”

— H. G. Wells

445. “A strange persuasion came upon me that, save for the grossness of the line, save for the grotesqueness of the forms, I had here before me the whole balance of human life in miniature, the whole interplay of instinct, reason, and fate in its simplest form.”

— H. G. Wells

446. “There’s some ex-traordinary things in books,” said the mariner.”

— H. G. Wells

447. “The situation was primordial. The Man beneath prevailed for a moment over the civilised superstructure, the Draper. He pushed at the pedals with archaic violence. So Palaeolithic man may have ridden his simple bicycle of chipped flint in pursuit of his exogamous affinity.”

— H. G. Wells

448. “There were half a dozen villas burning on the Woking border.”

— H. G. Wells

449. “To ride a bicycle properly is very like a love affair – chiefly it is a matter of faith. Believe you do it, and the thing is done; doubt, and, for the life of you, you cannot.”

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells