Quotes By H. G. Wells

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

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

Beauty is in the heart of the beholder.

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.

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

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.

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

History is a race between education and catastrophe.

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.

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?

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

You have learned something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.

It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not pay with their own.

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.

Advertising is legalized lying.

There's nothing wrong in suffering, if you suffer for a purpose. Our revolution didn't abolish danger or death. It simply made danger and death worthwhile.

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

The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow.

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

The past is but the past of a beginning.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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