H. G. Wells
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.Collection: Race
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.Collection: Lying
The man who raises a fist has run out of ideas.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Believe
When a man realizes his littleness, his greatness can appear.Collection: Sports
If anything is possible, then nothing is interestingCollection: Interesting
It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own.Collection: Peace
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.Collection: Errors
For all my desire to be interesting, I have to confess that for most things and people I don't give a damn.Collection: People
If your life doesn't end in failure, you haven't reached high enough. So it was failure I had to achieve.Collection: Enough
The greatest task of democracy, its ritual and feast - is choice.Collection: Freedom
In the scientific world I find just that disinterested devotion to great ends that I hope will spread at last through the entire range of human activity.Collection: Knowledge
Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence began in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau - and for what? It was the wantonness that stirred me.Collection: Struggle
After telephone, kinematograph and phonograph had replaced newspaper, book schoolmaster and letter, to live outside the range of the electric cables was to live an isolated savage.Collection: Book
When the history of civilization is written, it will be a biological history and Margaret Sanger will be its heroine.Collection: Civilization
You must follow me carefully. I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted. The geometry, for instance, they taught you at school is founded on a misconception.Collection: School
It [a new world order] needs only that the governments of Britain, the United States, France, Germany, and Russia should get together in order to set up an effective control of currency, credit, production, and distribution – that is to say, an effective ‘dictatorship of prosperity,’ for the whole world. The other sixty odd States would have to join in or accommodate themselves to the over-ruling decisions of these major Powers.Collection: Russia
Few people who know of the work of Langley, Lilienthal, Pilcher, Maxim and Chanute but will be inclined to believe that long before the year 2000 A.D., and very probably before 1950, a successful aeroplane will have soared and come home safe and sound.Collection: Believe
The crisis [the Great Depression] discovered a great man in Franklin Roosevelt...None too soon he has carried America forward to the second stage of democratic realization. His New Deal involves such collective controls of the national business that it would be absurd to call it anything but socialism, were it not for a prejudice lingering on from the old individualist days against that word...Both Roosevelt and Stalin were attempting to produce a huge, modern, scientifically organized, socialist state, the one out of a warning crisis and the other out of a chaos.Collection: Men
Democracy's ceremonial, its feast, it's great function, is the election.Collection: Military
I write to cover a frame of ideas.Collection: Writing
I felt naked. I felt as perhaps a bird may feel in the clear air knowing the hawk wings above and will swoop. I began to feel the need of fellowship. I wanted to question, wanted to speak, wanted to relate my experience. What is this spirit in man that urges him forever to depart from happiness, to toil and to place himself in danger?Collection: Men
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.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Eye
It is not much good thinking of a thing unless you think it out.Collection: Thinking
I saw a gray-haired man a figure of hale age, sitting at a desk and writing.Collection: Book
The passion for playing Chess is one of the most unaccountable in the worldCollection: Passion
Suddenly, like a thing falling upon me from without, came fear.Collection: Fear
He was inordinately proud of England and he abused her incessantly.Collection: Patriotic
We will peck them to death to-morrow, my dear.Collection: Morrow
I see knowledge increasing and human power increasing, I see everincreasing possibilities before life, and I see no limits set to it all. Existence impresses me as a perpetual dawn. Our lives, as I apprehend them, swim in expectation.Collection: Expectations
I often think we do not take this business of photography in a sufficiently serious spirit. Issuing a photograph is like marriage: you can only undo the mischief with infinite woe.Collection: Photography
No place is safe - no place is at peace. There is no place where a women and her daughter can hide and be at peace. The war comes through the air, bombs drop in the night. Quiet people go out in the morning, and see air-fleets passing overhead - dripping death - dripping death!Collection: Daughter
'It is love and reason,' I said, 'fleeing from all this madness of war.'Collection: War
Perhaps I am a man of exceptional moods. I do not know how far my experience is common. At times I suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all. This feeling was very strong upon me that night. Here was another side to my dream.Collection: Dream
Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of the organized life.Collection: Life
If we suppose a sufficient righteousness and intelligence in men to produce presently, from the tremendous lessons of history, an effective will for a world peace - that is to say, an effective will for a world law under a world government - for in no other fashion is a secure world peace conceivable - in what manner may we expect things to move towards this end? . . . It is an educational task, and its very essence is to bring to the minds of all men everywhere, as a necessary basis for world cooperation, a new telling and interpretation, a common interpretation, of history.Collection: Fashion
The fact is, the Time Traveller was one of those men who are too clever to be believed: you never felt that you saw all round him; you always suspected some subtle reserve, some ingenuity in ambush, behind his lucid frankness.Collection: Clever
Chess is a curse upon a man.Collection: Men
Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness. The work of ameliorating the conditions of life -- the true civilizing process that makes life more and more secure -- had gone steadily on to a climax... And the harvest was what I saw.Collection: Needs
You are trying to do a more difficult thing than record folk songs; you are trying to record life.Collection: Song
I was never a great amorist, though I have loved several people very deeply.Collection: People
The fertilising conflict of individualities is the ultimate meaning of the personal life.Collection: Individuality
Better it is toward the right conduct of life to consider what will be the end of a thing, than what is the beginning of it: for what promises fair at first may prove ill, and what seems at first a disadvantage, may prove very advantageous.Collection: Promise
An immense and ever-increasing wealth of knowledge is scattered about the world today; knowledge that would probably suffice to solve all the mighty difficulties of our age, but it is dispersed and unorganized. We need a sort of mental clearing house for the mind: a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared.Collection: Wealth Of Knowledge
This has ever been the fate of energy in security; it takes to art and to eroticism, and then comes languor and decay.Collection: Art
We can't have any weak or silly. Life is real again, and the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die. They ought to die. They ought to be willing to die. It's a sort of disloyalty, after all, to live and taint the race.Collection: Real
The great body of physical science, a great deal of the essential fact of financial science, and endless social and political problems are only accessible and only thinkable to those who have had a sound training in mathematical analysis, and the time may not be very remote when it will be understood that for complete initiation as an efficient citizen of one of the new great complex worldwide States that are now developing, it is as necessary to be able to compute, to think in averages and maxima and minima, as it is now to be able to read and write.Collection: Writing
...the voice was indisputable. It continued to swear with that breadth and variety that distinguishes the swearing of a cultivated man.Collection: Men