H. G. Wells's Quotes

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

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

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

Cynicism is humor in ill health.

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.

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

Human history in essence is the history of ideas.

I had rather be called a journalist than an artist.

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

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

The past is but the past of a beginning.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.