H. G. Wells quotes:

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.

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.

There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection.

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.

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

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

Sailors ought never to go to church. They ought to go to hell, where it is much more comfortable.

Biologically the species is the accumulation of the experiments of all its successful individuals since the beginning.

What really matters is what you do with what you have.

The path of social advancement is, and must be, strewn with broken friendships.

Cynicism is humor in ill health.

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.

Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State's failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community.

In politics, strangely enough, the best way to play your cards is to lay them face upwards on the table.

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.

The uglier a man's legs are, the better he plays golf - it's almost a law.

Human history in essence is the history of ideas.

The past is the beginning of the beginning and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.

The past is but the past of a beginning.

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.

You must follow me carefully. I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted. The geometry, for instance, they taught you at school is founded on a misconception."

Once the command of the air is obtained by one of the contending armies, the war becomes a conflict between a seeing host and one that is blind.

History is a race between education and catastrophe.

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

Modern war, modern international hostility is, I believe, possible only through the stupid illiteracy of the mass of men and the conceit and intellectual indolence of rulers and those who feed the public mind.

If we don't end war, war will end us.

This isn't a war, said the artilleryman. It never was a war, any more than there's war between man and ants.

It is love and reason,' I said,'fleeing from all the madness of war.

And there it was, on a shabby bed in a tawdry, ill-lighted bedroom, surrounded by a crowd of ignorant and excited people, broken and wounded, betrayed and unpitied, that Griffin, the first of all men to make himself invisible, Griffin, the most gifted physicist the world has ever seen, ended in infinite disaster his strange and terrible career.

This has ever been the fate of energy in security; it takes to art and to eroticism, and then comes languor and decay.

There is no more evil thing in this world than race prejudice, none at all. [...] It justifies and holds together more baseness, cruelty, and abomination than any other sort of error in the world.

Advertising is legalized lying.

Affliction comes to us, not to make us sad but sober; not to make us sorry but wise.

The fact is, the Time Traveller was one of those men who are too clever to be believed: you never felt that you saw all round him; you always suspected some subtle reserve, some ingenuity in ambush, behind his lucid frankness.

Every time Europe looks across the Atlantic to see the American Eagle, it observes only the rear end of an ostrich.

The Anglo-Saxon genius for parliamentary government asserted itself; there was a great deal of talk and no decisive action.

Arson, after all, is an artificial crime...A large number of houses deserve to be burnt.

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

About two-thirds of the face of Marx is beard, a vast solemn wooly uneventful beard that must have made all normal exercise impossible. It is not the sort of beard that happens to a man, it is a beard cultivated, cherished, and thrust patriarchally upon the world.

Beauty is in the heart of the beholder.

If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.

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

Good books are the warehouses of ideas.

Our true nationality is mankind.

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.

The brain upon which my experiences have been written is not a particularly good one. If their were brain-shows, as there are cat and dog shows, I doubt if it would get even a third class prize.

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 in not justified, at any rate you will have been cheerful.

Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of the organized life.

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?

I must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea.

The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow.

Human society is based on want. Life is based on want. Wild-eyed visionaries may dream of a world without need. Cloud-cuckoo-land. It can't be done.

After your first day of cycling, one dream is inevitable. A memory of motion lingers in the muscles of your legs, and round and round they seem to go. You ride through Dreamland on wonderful dream bicycles that change and grow.

We can't have any weak or silly. Life is real again, and the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die. They ought to die. They ought to be willing to die. It's a sort of disloyalty, after all, to live and taint the race.

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

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.

A downtrodden class... will never be able to make an effective protest until it achieves solidarity.

If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn't expecting it.

Everywhere in the world there are ignorance and prejudice, but the greatest complex of these, with the most extensive prestige and the most intimate entanglement with traditional institutions, is the Roman Catholic Church.

A federation of all humanity, together with a sufficient measure of social justice, to ensure health, education, and a rough equality of opportunity to most of the children born into the world, would mean such a release and increase of human energy as to open a new phase in human history.

With wine and food, the confidence of my own table, and the necessity of reassuring my wife, I grew by insensible degrees courageous and secure.

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.

Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.

It is not much good thinking of a thing unless you think it out.

Man ... can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way.

We were not making war against Germany, we were being ordered about in the King's war with Germany.

This is the end and the beginning of an age. This is something far greater than the French Revolution or the Reformation and we live in it.

We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity.

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.

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

I had just taken to reading. I had just discovered the art of leaving my body to sit impassive in a crumpled up attitude in a chair or sofa, while I wandered over the hills and far away in novel company and new scenes... My world began to expand very rapidly,... the reading habit had got me securely.

But there are times when the little cloud spreads, until it obscures the sky. And those times I look around at my fellow men and I am reminded of some likeness of the beast-people, and I feel as though the animal is surging up in them. And I know they are neither wholly animal nor holy man, but an unstable combination of both.

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?

Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe swims.

The history of mankind for the last four centuries is rather like that of an imprisoned sleeper, stirring clumsily and uneasily while the prison that restrains and shelters him catches fire, not waking but incorporating the crackling and warmth of the fire with ancient and incongruous dreams, than like that of a man consciously awake to danger and opportunity.

The German people are an orderly, vain, deeply sentimental and rather insensitive people. They seem to feel at their best when they are singing in chorus, saluting or obeying orders.

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

Be a man!... What good is religion if it collapses under calamity? Think of what earthquakes and floods, wars and volcanoes, have done before to men! Did you think that God had exempted [us]? He is not an insurance agent.

Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence began in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau - and for what? It was the wantonness that stirred me.

I went over the heads of the things a man reckons desirable. No doubt invisibility made it possible to get them, but it made it impossible to enjoy them when they are got.

The Islamic teachings have left great traditions for equitable and gentle dealings and behavior, and inspire people with nobility and tolerance. These are human teachings of the highest order and at the same time practicable. These teachings brought into existence a society in which hard-heartedness and collective oppression and injustice were the least as compared with all other societies preceding it....Islam is replete with gentleness, courtesy, and fraternity.

I am an historian, I am not a believer, but I must confess as a historian that this penniless preacher from Nazareth is irrevocably the very center of history. Jesus Christ is easily the most dominant figure in all history.

The path of least resistance is the path of the loser.

once you lose yourself, you have two choices: find the person you used to be, or lose that person completely.

Religions are such stuff as dreams are made of.

Tell the truth and read story books;it will take you to the magical moment in a glory night.

Countless people...will hate the New World Order...and will die protesting against it...we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents...

The only true measure of success is the ratio between what we might have done and what we might have been on the one hand, and the thing we have made and the things we have made of ourselves on the other.

If Max [Aitken] gets to Heaven he won't last long. He will be chucked out for trying to pull off a merger between Heaven and Hell ... after having secured a controlling interest in key subsidiary companies in both places, of course.

Very much indeed of what we call moral education is such an artificial modification and perversion of instinct; pugnacity is trained into courageous self-sacrifice, and suppressed sexuality into religious emotion.

Strength is the outcome of need.

We live in reference to past experience and not to future events, however inevitable.

After telephone, kinematograph and phonograph had replaced newspaper, book schoolmaster and letter, to live outside the range of the electric cables was to live an isolated savage.

Even men who were engaged in organizing debt-serf cultivation and debt-serf industrialism in the American cotton districts, in the old rubber plantations, and in the factories of India, China, and South Italy, appeared as generous supporters of and subscribers to the sacred cause of individual liberty.

...the ethical system that will dominate the world-state will be shaped primarily to favor the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity - beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds - and to check the procreation of base and servile type.

In all ages, far back into prehistory, we find human beings have painted and adorned themselves.

Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black looked at in the right light and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart.

No place is safe - no place is at peace. There is no place where a women and her daughter can hide and be at peace. The war comes through the air, bombs drop in the night. Quiet people go out in the morning, and see air-fleets passing overhead - dripping death - dripping death!

The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature.

Fools make researches and wise men exploit them.

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 in not justified, at any rate you will have been cheerful

I never yet heard of a useless thing that was not ground out ofexistence by evolution sooner or later. Did you? And pain gets needless.

Very well," said the Voice, in a tone of relief. "Then I'm going to throw flints at you till you think differently.

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.

My pockets had always puzzled Weena, but at the last she had concluded that they were an eccentric kind of vase for floral decoration.

But he was one of those weak creatures, void of pride, timorous, anemic, hateful souls, full of shifty cunning, who face neither God nor man, who face not even themselves.

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.

What I want to know is, in the Middle Ages, did they do anything for Housemaid's Knee? What did they put in their hot baths after jousting?

A boy is a creature of odd feelings.

If after all my Atheology turns out wrong and your Theology right I feel I shall always be able to pass into Heaven (if I want to) as a friend of G.K.C.'s. Bless you.

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

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

But the Modern Utopia must not be static but kinetic, must shape not as a permanent state but as a hopeful stage, leading to a long ascent of stages. Nowadays we do not resist and overcome the great stream of things, but rather float upon it. We build now not citadels, but ships of state.

The peaceful splendour of the night healed again. The moon was now past the meridian and travelling down the west. It was at its full, and very bright, riding through the empty blue sky.

I want to go ahead of Father Time with a scythe of my own.

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.

The future is the shape of things to come.

In all the round world of Utopia there is no meat. There used to be, but now we cannot stand the thought of slaughterhouses. And it is impossible to find anyone who will hew a dead ox or pig. I can still remember as a boy the rejoicings over the closing of the last slaughterhouse.

In all the round world there is no meat. There used to be. But now we cannot stand the thought of slaughterhouses.

The Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie to and humbug themselves for the general Good. Lies are the mortar that bind the savage individual man into the social masonry.