Quotes By H. G. Wells

Human history in essence is the history of ideas.

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.

Our true nationality is mankind.

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

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

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

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

Beauty is in the heart of the beholder.

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

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.

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.

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?

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.

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.

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

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.

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

Advertising is legalized lying.

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

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 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.

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

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

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 but the past of a beginning.

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