H. g. wells quotes

Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write!

Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough---as most wrong theories are!

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

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

Rest enough for the individual man, too much and too soon, and we call it death. But for man, no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First this little planet and all its winds and ways, and then all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about him, and, at last, out across immensities to the stars. And when he has conquered all the deep space, and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning.

Success is to be measured not by wealth, power, or fame, but by the ratio between what a man is and what he might be.

There's truths you have to grow into.

Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe swims.

... life falls into place only with God.

There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.

Night, the mother of fear and mystery, was coming upon me.

Losing your way on a journey is unfortunate. But, losing your reason for the journey is a fate more cruel.

...fact takes no heed of human hopes.

There is no more evil thing in this world than race prejudice, none at all. [...] It justifies and holds together more baseness, cruelty, and abomination than any other sort of error in the world.

The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities and businesses and economic relations, shook them also out of their old-established habits of thought, and out of the lightly held beliefs and prejudices that came down to them from the past.

Countless people...will hate the New World Order...and will die protesting against it...we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents.

When a man realizes his littleness, his greatness can appear.

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

If there is no God, nothing matters. If there is a God, nothing else matters.

This is the end and the beginning of an age. This is something far greater than the French Revolution or the Reformation and we live in it.

To be honest, one must be inconsistent.

For all my desire to be interesting, I have to confess that for most things and people I don't give a damn.

We should strive to welcome change and challenges, because they are what help us grow. With out them we grow weak like the Eloi in comfort and security. We need to constantly be challenging ourselves in order to strengthen our character and increase our intelligence.

Hunger makes a fool of a man.

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

The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow.

I must confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world

If your life doesn't end in failure, you haven't reached high enough. So it was failure I had to achieve.

Everyone leaves the world a little better some by leaving.

If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.

Satan delights equally in statistics and in quoting scripture.

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

Be a man!... What good is religion if it collapses under calamity? Think of what earthquakes and floods, wars and volcanoes, have done before to men! Did you think that God had exempted [us]? He is not an insurance agent.

Endless conflicts. Endless misunderstanding. All life is that. Great and little cannot understand one another.

No compulsion in the world is stronger than the urge to edit someone else's document.

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

The new century will see changes that will dwarf those of the last.

A priest is a man vowed, trained, and consecrated, a man belonging to a special corps, and necessarily with an intense esprit de corps. He has given up his life to his temple and his god. This is a very excellent thing for the internal vigour of his own priesthood, his own temple. He lives and dies for the honour of his particular god. But in the next town or village is another temple with another god. It is his constant preoccupation to keep his people from that god. Religious cults and priesthoods are sectarian by nature; they will convert, they will overcome, but they will never coalesce.

There is no reason whatever to believe that the order of nature has any greater bias in favour of man than it had in favour of the ichthyosaur or the pterodactyl.

I do not believe I have any immortality. The greatest evil in the world today is the Christian religion

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

A time will come when men will sit with history before them or with some old newspaper before them and ask incredulously,"Was there ever such a world?"

We were making the future and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making. And here it is!

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.

What on earth would a man do with himself, if something did not stand in his way?

Armament should be an illegality everywhere, and some sort of international force should patrol a treaty-bound world. Partial armament is one of those absurdities dear to moderate-minded 'reasonable' men. Armament itself is making war. Making a gun, pointing a gun, and firing it are all acts of the same order. It should be illegal to construct anywhere upon earth any mechanism for the specific purpose of killing men. When you see a gun it is reasonable to ask: 'Whom is that intended to kill?'

Marriage isn't what it was. It's become a different thing because women have become human beings.

Will is stronger than fact: it can mold and overcome fact.

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

Let your love be stronger than your hate or anger. Learn the wisdom of compromise, for it is better to bend a little than to break.

The War That Will End War.

Fools make researches and wise men exploit them.

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

The cat, which is a solitary beast, is single minded and goes its way alone, but, the dog, like his master, is confused in his mind.

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.

Is it any wonder that to this day this Galilean is too much for our small hearts?

The future is the shape of things to come.

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.

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

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.

Strength is the outcome of need.

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 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.

Books-bright windows in this life of ours, lit by the shining souls of men.

The history of India for many centuries had been happier, less fierce, and more dreamlike than any other history. In these favorable conditions, they built a character - meditative and peaceful and a nation of philosophers such as could nowhere have existed except in India.

once you lose yourself, you have two choices: find the person you used to be, or lose that person completely.

Every one of these hundreds of millions of human beings is in some form seeking happiness.... Not one is altogether noble nor altogether trustworthy nor altogether consistent; and not one is altogether vile.... Not a single one but has at some time wept.

The world state must begin; it can only begin, as a propaganda cult, or as a group of propagandist cults, to which men and women must give themselves and their energies, regardless of the consequence to themselves The activities of a cult which sets itself to bring about the world-state would at first be propagandist, they would be intellectual and educational, and only as a sufficient mass of opinion and will had accumulated would they become to a predominant extent politically constructive. Such a cult must direct itself particularly to the teaching of the young.

New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not belittled the humiliating question arises 'Why then are you not taking part in them?

The man who raises a fist has run out of ideas.

I had just taken to reading. I had just discovered the art of leaving my body to sit impassive in a crumpled up attitude in a chair or sofa, while I wandered over the hills and far away in novel company and new scenes... My world began to expand very rapidly,... the reading habit had got me securely.

If anything is possible, then nothing is interesting

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.

Christ is the most unique person of history. No man can write a history of the human race without giving first and foremost place to the penniless Teacher of Nazareth.

A downtrodden class... will never be able to make an effective protest until it achieves solidarity.

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

This blessed gift of smoking!

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

Cycle trails will abound in Utopia.

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.

What good is religion if it collapses under calamity?

We must end war before war ends us.

Life, forever dying to be born afresh, forever young and eager, will presently stand upon this Earth as upon a footstool, and stretch out its realm amidst the stars.

Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness.

It is the system of nationalist individualism that has to go....We are living in the end of the sovereign states....In the great struggle to evoke a Westernized World Socialism, contemporary governments may vanish....Countless people...will hate the new world order....and will die protesting against it.

The past is but the past of a beginning.

Beauty is in the heart of the beholder.

Am I dreaming? Has the world gone mad--or have I?

States organized for war will make war as surely as hens will lay eggs.

Our true nationality is mankind.

The Islamic teachings have left great traditions for equitable and gentle dealings and behavior, and inspire people with nobility and tolerance. These are human teachings of the highest order and at the same time practicable. These teachings brought into existence a society in which hard-heartedness and collective oppression and injustice were the least as compared with all other societies preceding it....Islam is replete with gentleness, courtesy, and fraternity.

Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future.

The religion of the atheist has a God-shaped blank at it's heart.

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

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.

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

Advertising is legalized lying.

He who does not contemplate the future is destined to be overwhelmed by it.

It sounds plausible enough tonight, but wait until tomorrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning.

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

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.

Good books are the warehouses of ideas.

Civilization is in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.

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.

The greatest task of democracy, its ritual and feast - is choice.

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

There are no social differences - till women come in.

If the world does not please you, you can change it.

You are not mechanics, you are warriors. You have been trained, not to think, but to do.

We live in reference to past experience and not to future events, however inevitable.

The true objection to slavery is not that it is unjust to the inferior but that it corrupts the superior.

If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn't expecting it.

Fools make researches and wise men exploit them - that is our earthly way of dealing with the question, and we thank Heaven for an assumed abundance of financially impotent and sufficiently ingenious fools.

I hope, or I could not live.

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.

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

This isn't a war," said the artilleryman. "It never was a war, any more than there's war between man and ants.

Sometimes, you have to step outside of the person you've been and remember the person you were meant to be. The person you want to be. The person you are.

There is no upper limit to what individuals are capable of doing with their minds. There is no age limit that bars them from beginning. There is no obstacle that cannot be overcome if they persist and believe.

A young mistress is better than an old master.

Religion is the first thing and the last thing, and until a man has found God and been found by God, he begins at no beginning, he works to no end.

Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change.

We live in a world of unused and misapplied knowledge and skill.

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.

Find the thing you want to do most intensely, make sure that’s it, and do it with all your might. If you live, well and good. If you die, well and good. Your purpose is done