H.G. Wells - biography

“Advertising is legalized lying.”

“Beauty is in the heart of the beholder.”

“It becomes a bore doing imaginative books that do not touch imaginations, and at length one stops even planning them.”

“So far there has been no real civilisation of the world; civilisation is still only an occasional incident, a passing gleam of promise in the lives of a handful of people here and there.  But civilisation will come at last for all. ”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“[On Fritz Lang’s Metropolis:] I have recently seen the silliest film.  I do not believe it is possible to make one sillier.  It gives in one eddying concentration almost every possible foolishness, cliché, platitude and muddlement about mechanical progress in general, served up with a sauce of sentimentality that is all its own.  Possibly I dislike this soupy whirlpool none the less because I find decaying fragments of my own juvenile work of thirty years ago, ‘The Sleeper Awakes’, floating about in it.  I do not think there is a single new idea, a single instance of artistic creation or even of intelligent anticipation, from first to last in the whole pretentious stew. ”

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

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

“Human history in essence is the history of ideas.”

“The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow.”

“The past is but the past of a beginning.”

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

“I had rather be called a journalist than an artist.”

“I hope, or I could not live.”

“Only people who are well off can be complex.”

“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.”

“But my own temperament makes it unavoidable for me to doubt, as I have said, that there will not be that small minority which will succeed in seeing life out to its inevitable end. ”

“Of all the time-honoured fatuities that men repeat and repeat, and comfort themselves mysteriously by repeating, none surely are more patently absurd than those which assert the unchangeableness of human life. ”

“Our true nationality is mankind.”

“Our universe is not entirely bankrupt; there remains no dividend at all; it has not simply liquidated; it is going clean out of existence, leaving not a wrack behind.  The attempt to trace a pattern of any sort is absolutely futile. ”

“To a watcher in some remote entirely alien cosmos, if we may assume that possibility, it might well seem that extinction is coming to man like a brutal thunderclap of Halt! ”

“Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.”

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

“It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble.  An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism.  Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless.  There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change.  Only those animals partake of intelligence that have a huge variety of needs and dangers.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

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

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

“Non-violence is the policy of the vegetable kingdom”

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

“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?”

“The politicians of Great Britain, under the pressure of various accidental and some fundamental necessities, are being forced towards an honest democracy and efficient government.  But they resist with great activity and ingenuity. ”

“Do men and women generally want a better world than this?  Do they want a world free from war, general economic security, a higher level of general health, long life, freedom and hope for everyone?  The conventional answer is, ‘Of course they do.’ But the true answer is, ‘Not much!’”

“I belong to a small but growing minority which believes that man has come to such a phase of knowledge and power that he is already able and may very soon be willing to put a bit between the teeth of the monster of wild change that is now trampling this world. ”

“Is the Anglo-Saxon fit to govern any other race?  He sprawls across the earth.  He rules hundreds of millions of brown and black and buff peoples; he dominates and ‘protects’ an even larger number than he governs.  And there are moments when one is struck by a sense of his immense ineptitude...  It is probable that no race is fit to have the upper hand over any other race. ”

“Religion is pickled God.”

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

“I have a real affection for Communists - and a temperate admiration.  It is the sort of love that leaps forward to chasten. ”

“Socialism is no panacea, no magic ‘Open Sesame’ to the millennium.  Socialism lights up once certain evils in human affairs and shows the path by which escape is possible, but it leaves that path rugged and difficult.  Socialism is hope, but it is not assurance. ”

“The particular evil of the Marxist teaching is this, that it carries the conception of a necessary economic development to the pitch of fatalism, it declares with all the solemnity of popular ‘science’ that Socialism must prevail.  Such a fatalism is morally bad for the adherent; it releases him from the inspiring sense of uncertain victory, it leads him to believe the stars in their courses will do the job for him. ”

“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.”

“Science is a match that man has just got alight.  He thought he was in a room - in moments of devotion, a temple - and that his light would be reflected from and display walls inscribed with wonderful secrets and pillars carved with philosophical systems wrought into harmony.  It is a curious sensation, now that the preliminary splutter is over and the flame burns up clear, to see his hands lit and just a glimpse of himself and the patch he stands on visible, and around him, in place of all that human comfort and beauty he anticipated - darkness still.”

“All men, however highly educated, retain some superstitious inklings.”

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

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

“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.”

“Heresies are experiments in man’s unsatisfied search for truth.”

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

“I am one of those people who believe that if human affairs are to go on without delay and catastrophe, there must be an end to the organisation of war.  I believe that the power to prepare for war and make war must be withdrawn from separate States...  and that ultimately there must be a Confederation of all mankind to keep one peace throughout the world. ”

“If we don’t end war, war will end us.”

“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.”

“I write as straight as I can, just as I walk as straight as I can, because that is the best way to get there.”

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

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

“Cynicism is humor in ill health.”

“Go away.  I’m all right.”

“If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.”

“Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo. ”

“No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.”

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

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

“Simple people like to believe that there are Great Men in the world who are altogether above this tangle of drive and impulse.  But indeed there are no such divinities. ”

“Some people bear three kinds of trouble - the ones they’ve had, the ones they have, and the ones they expect to have.”

“Strength is the outcome of need. ”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

H.G. Wells contributed to the screenplay for the following films:
Marriage (1927)
Blue Bottles (1928)
Daydreams (1928)
Island of Lost Souls (1932)
The Invisible Man (1933)
The Man Who Could Work Miracles (1936)
Things to Come (1936)
The Invisible Man Returns (1940)
Kipps (1941)
Invisible Agent (1942)
The Invisible Man’s Revenge (1944)
Dead of Night (1945)
The History of Mr. Polly (1949)
The Passionate Friends (1949)
The War of the Worlds (1953)
The Time Machine (1960)
La Merveilleuse visite (1974)
The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977)
Empire of the Ants (1977)
The Shape of Things to Come (1979)
The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996)
The Time Machine (2002)
War of the Worlds (2005)