Quotes from H. G. Wells

When the history of civilization is written, it will be a biological history and Margaret Sanger will be its heroine.

Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia.

After your first day of cycling, one dream is inevitable. A memory of motion lingers in the muscles of your legs, and round and round they seem to go. You ride through Dreamland on wonderful dream bicycles that change and grow.

History is a race between education and catastrophe.

Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the early twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands.

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

The Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie to and humbug themselves and one another for the general Good. Lies are the mortar that bind the savage individual man into the social masonry.

Cynicism is humor in ill health.

Human history in essence is the history of ideas.

When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race.

Beauty is in the heart of the beholder.

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 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.

Life begins perpetually. Gathered together at last under the leadership of man… unified, disciplined, armed with the secret powers of the atom and with knowledge as yet beyond dreaming, 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.

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.

Are we not Men?

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

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

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

The New World Order.

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.

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.

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

Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.