Top 100 H G Wells Quotes
#1. As a kid I read Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and a few others. As an adult have admired Leonardo da Vinci's drawings and notebooks.
Viggo Mortensen
#2. We always assumed the aliens would have to at least be alive to invade. Not even H.G. Wells expected an invasion of ghosts.
Stephen King
#3. Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory - all these have served, in H. G. Wells's phrase, as Doors in the Wall.
Aldous Huxley
#4. Sometimes I feel that a more rational explanation for all that has happened during my lifetime is that I am still only thirteen years old, reading Jules Verne or H. G. Wells, and have fallen asleep.
Stanislaw Ulam
#5. Britain has had a very honourable tradition of literary sci-fi - H. G. Wells, John Wyndham, J. G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Michael Moorcock - but for whatever reason, they have never really been given the time of day on screen.
Richard Stanley
#6. I am not Nostradamus.Nor would I want to be. I'm convinced being able to tell the future is the worst superpower. I'd rather be invisible and being invisible never ends well. Just read H. G. Wells!
Justine Larbalestier
#7. I have already told you of the sickness and confusion that comes with time travelling. - H. G. WELLS
William Gibson
#8. The past is but the beginning of a beginning. - H. G. Wells, The Discovery of the Future
Laurie R. King
#9. Those were the days in this country where H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw and Conan Doyle could have influence, and thats gone, thats true. But I dont think we have less influence in the hearts and minds of readers. I think, if anything, we have just as much, if not more.
Julian Barnes
#10. Wisdom: Oh, fantastic. We've got an army made up of fairies and Beatles, and we're fighting H. G. Wells' martians and bloody Jack the Rippers. Who's next? Dick Van Dyke? Mr Bean? John Cleese and his dead parrot?
Paul Cornell
#11. I think there's always been a traditionally apocalyptic side to British science fiction, from H.G. Wells onwards. I mean, most of Wells' stories are potentially apocalyptic in some sense or another.
Alan Moore
#12. First electricity, now telephones. Sometimes I feel as if I'm living in an H.G. Wells novel.
Lady Violet
#13. At this point, there flashed briefly through Stenton's horrified mind the memory of that timeless classic, H. G. Wells's "The Star." He had first read it as a small boy, and it had helped to spark his interest in astronomy.
Arthur C. Clarke
#14. The science fiction author, H.G. Wells was an avid supporter of eugenics and a believer in a hierarchy of the races.
A.E. Samaan
#15. [I] browsed far outside science in my reading and attended public lectures - Bertrand Russell, H. G. Wells, Huxley, and Shaw being my favorite speakers.
Raymond Cattell
#16. There is a long dishonourable tradition of western intellectuals who have been duped by Moscow. The list includes Bernard Shaw, the Webbs, H. G. Wells, and Andre Gide.
Luke Harding
#17. By 'scientifiction' I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story-a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision
Hugo Gernsback
#18. Civilization is a race between education and catastrophe. - H. G. Wells
Ken Robinson
#19. She always seemed to me, I fancy, more human than she was, perhaps because her affection was so human.
H.G.Wells
#20. The true strength of rulers and empires lies not in armies or emotions, but in the belief of men that they are inflexibly open and truthful and legal. As soon as a government departs from that standard it ceases to be anything more than 'the gang in possession,' and its days are numbered.
H.G.Wells
#21. What is your theologian's ecstasy but Mahomet's houri in the dark?
H.G.Wells
#22. The truly brave man is not the man who does not feel fear but the man who overcomes it.
H.G.Wells
#23. Given as much law as that man will be able to do anything and go anywhere, an the only trace of pessimism left in the human prospect today is a faint flavour that one was born so soon.
H.G.Wells
#24. I often think we do not take this business of photography in a sufficiently serious spirit. Issuing a photograph is like marriage: you can only undo the mischief with infinite woe ...
H.G.Wells
#25. I suppose a suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder at what will come next as I felt then.
H.G.Wells
#26. We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity.
H.G.Wells
#27. Even now, does not an East-end worker live in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the natural surface of the earth?
H.G.Wells
#28. Are we all bubbles blown by a baby?
H.G.Wells
#29. Human history in essence is the history of ideas.
H.G.Wells
#31. Strychnine is a grand tonic, Kemp, to take the flabbiness out of a man.
H.G.Wells
#32. I write to cover a frame of ideas.
H.G.Wells
#33. And with that the Time Traveller began his story as I have set it forth. He sat back in his chair at first, and spoke like a weary man. Afterwards he got more animated.
H.G.Wells
#35. The Jews looked for a special savior, a messiah, who was to redeem mankind by the agreeable process of restoring the fabulous glories of David and Solomon, and bringing the whole world at last under the firm but benevolent Jewish heel.
H.G.Wells
#36. In all ages, far back into prehistory, we find human beings have painted and adorned themselves.
H.G.Wells
#37. I was never a great amorist, though I have loved several people very deeply.
H.G.Wells
#38. 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.
H.G.Wells
#39. I do not know if hell is hot or cold, or what sort of place hell may be, but this I surely know, that if there is any hell at all it will be badly lit. And it will taste like a train.
H.G.Wells
#40. They are mad; they are fools," said the Dog-man.
H.G.Wells
#41. 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
#42. There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time.
H.G.Wells
#43. He lit the dining-room lamp, got out a cigar, and began pacing the room, ejaculating.
H.G.Wells
#44. Or did a Martian sit within each, ruling, directing, using, much as a man's brain sits and rules in his body? I began to compare the things to human machines, to ask myself for the first time in my life how an ironclad or a steam engine would seem to an intelligent lower animal.
H.G.Wells
#45. You are not mechanics, you are warriors. You have been trained, not to think, but to do.
H.G.Wells
#46. 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
#47. In another place was a vast array of idols - Polynesian, Mexican, Grecian, Phoenician, every country on earth I should think. And here, yielding to an irresistible impulse, I wrote my name upon the nose of a steatite monster from South America that particularly took my fancy.
H.G.Wells
#48. We should remember how repulsive our carnivorous habits would seem to an intelligent rabbit.
H.G.Wells
#49. Few people realize the immensity of vacancy.
H.G.Wells
#50. There's something in this starlight that loosens one's tongue. I'm an ass, and yet somehow I would like to tell you.
H.G.Wells
#51. 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
#52. (...) I ducked once underwater and holding my breath until movement was an agony, blundered painfully ahead, under the surface, for as long as I could. The water was in a tumult about me.
H.G.Wells
#53. Face this world. Learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end you will find clues to it all.
H.G.Wells
#54. We live in reference to past experience and not to future events, however inevitable.
H.G.Wells
#55. Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness.
H.G.Wells
#56. Nothing remains interesting where anything may happen.
H.G.Wells
#57. One of those pertinacious tempers that would warm every day to a white heat and never again cool to forgiveness.
H.G.Wells
#58. 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.
H.G.Wells
#59. Restraint, soberness, the matured thought, the unselfish act, they are necessities of the barbarous state, the life of dangers. Dourness is man's tribute to unconquered nature.
H.G.Wells
#60. 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.
H.G.Wells
#61. Anthropology has been compared to a great region, marked out indeed as within the sphere of influence of science, but unsettled and for the most part unsubdued. Like all such hinterland sciences, it is a happy hunting-ground for adventurers.
H.G.Wells
#62. Mankind has got to start getting the big things right.
H.G.Wells
#63. Like a committee in a thieves' kitchen when someone has casually mentioned the law.
H.G.Wells
#64. 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
#65. Of the risks a man has got to take! Now the risk was inevitable, I no longer saw it in the same cheerful light. The fact is that, insensibly, the absolute strangeness of everything, the sickly jarring and swaying of the machine,
H.G.Wells
#66. The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us.
H.G.Wells
#67. The fertilising conflict of individualities is the ultimate meaning of the personal life.
H.G.Wells
#68. I don't know things. I'm not good enough. I'm not refined. The more you see of me, the more you'll find me out.'
'But I'm going to help you.'
'You'll 'ave to 'elp me a fearful lot.
H.G.Wells
#69. Hunger and a lack of blood-corpuscles take all the manhood from a man.
H.G.Wells
#70. 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
#71. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not pay with their own.
H.G.Wells
#72. Now whenever things are so that a lot of people feel they ought to be doing something, the weak, and those who go weak with a lot of complicated thinking, always make for a sort of do-nothing religion, very pious and superior, and submit to persecution and the will of the Lord.
H.G.Wells
#73. Go away. I'm all right. [last words]
H.G.Wells
#74. He was inordinately proud of England and he abused her incessantly.
H.G.Wells
#75. Heresies are experiments in man's unsatisfied search for truth.
H.G.Wells
#76. Few people who know of the work of Langley, Lilienthal, Pilcher, Maxim and Chanute but will be inclined to believe that long before the year 2000 A.D., and very probably before 1950, a successful aeroplane will have soared and come home safe and sound.
H.G.Wells
#77. But I know it was a dull white, and had strange large greyish-red eyes; also that there was flaxen hair on its head and down its back.
H.G.Wells
#78. To be honest, one must be inconsistent.
H.G.Wells
#79. Our true nationality is mankind.
H.G.Wells
#80. You're a solemn prig, Prendick, a silly ass! You're always fearing and fancying. We're on the edge of things. I'm bound to cut my throat tomorrow. I'm going to have a damned Bank Holiday tonight.
H.G.Wells
#81. Every time Europe looks across the Atlantic to see the American Eagle, it observes only the rear end of an ostrich.
H.G.Wells
#82. Life falls into place only with God.
H.G.Wells
#83. Take it as a lie - or a prophecy. Say I dreamed it in the workshop. Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race until I have hatched this fiction.
H.G.Wells
#84. There is still something in everything I do that defeats me, makes me dissatisfied, challenges me to further effort. Sometimes I rise above my level, sometimes I fall below it, but always I fall short of the things I dream.
H.G.Wells
#85. 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.
H.G.Wells
#86. Nobody read books, but women, parsons and idle people.
H.G.Wells
#87. Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
H.G.Wells
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. In the middle of the night she woke up dreaming of huge white heads like turnips, that came trailing after her, at the end of interminable necks, and with vast black eyes. But being a sensible woman, she subdued her terrors and turned over and went to sleep again.
H.G.Wells
#92. We're in a blessed drainpipe, and we've got to crawl along it till we die.
H.G.Wells
#93. The new century will see changes that will dwarf those of the last.
H.G.Wells
#94. Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of the organized life.
H.G.Wells
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. But-! I say! The common conventions of humanity-'
'Are all very well for common people.
H.G.Wells
#98. Room to swing a cat, it seemed was absolutely essential. It was an infrequent but indispensable operation.
H.G.Wells
#99. 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.
H.G.Wells
#100. 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
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