H.G. Wells Quotes

Cynicism is humor in ill health.

In our postmodern culture which is TV dominated, image sensitive, and morally vacuous, personality is everything and character is increasingly irrelevant.

The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the pain in the world had found a voice

The characters in a children's book must reach into the heart of the reader on page one. Emotional content is the main reason a child and a parent will go back to a book again and again.

All really good picture books are written to be read five hundred times

The wages of sin is alimony.

A fool and his money are soon married.

A cynic is a man who looks at the world with a monocle in his mind's eye.

A biography should be a dissection and demonstration of how a particular human being was made and worked.

It's like . . . time is flowing backward. We're caveman archeologists in the ruins of the future.

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.

O, if my husband could only love me even a little and not seem to be perfectly indifferent to any sensation of that kind... O my poor aching heart when shall it rest its burden only on the Lord.

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.

Fools make researches and wise men exploit them.

The great trouble with you Americans is that you are still under the influence of that second-rate - shall I say third-rate? - mind, Karl Marx.

Human history is, in essence, a history of ideas.

To ride a bicycle properly is very like a love affair-chiefly it is a matter of faith. Believe you do it, and the thing is done; doubt, and, for the life of you, you cannot.

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?

In all ages, far back into prehistory, we find human beings have painted and adorned themselves.

God does not always heal us instantly the way we think. He is not a jack-in-the-box God. But God is walking with me through this.

The only books that work are those which fly through the air - the ones you let happen, not make happen.

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

I am more fond of achieving than striving. My theories must prove to be facts or be discarded as worthless. My efforts must soon be crowned with success, or discontinued.

(As a boy) I was listening to Sonny Boy Williamson's (I) records and I would close my eyes and I could visualize myself playing the harp.

You wouldn't believe On All Hallow Eve What lots of fun we can make, With apples to bob, And nuts on the hob, And a ring-and-thimble cake.

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

Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life.

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

Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of the organized life.

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

I don't believe the half I hear, Nor the quarter of what I see! But I have one faith, sublime and true, That nothing can shake or slay; Each spring I firmly believe anew All the seed catalogues say!

...the Idumeans (Edomites) were...made Jews...and a Turkish people (Khazars) were mainly Jews in South Russia...The main part of Jewry never was in Judea and had never come out of Judea.

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

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

Are we all bubbles blown by a baby?

So utterly at variance is Destiny with all the little plans of men.

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

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

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

For after the Battle comes quiet.

He began to realize that you cannot even fight happily with creatures that stand upon a different mental basis to yourself.

The future is the shape of things to come.

Every dogma must have its day.

Despotism increases in severity with the number of despots; the responsibility is more divided, and the claims are more numerous.

How wide and sweet and wild motherhood and sisterhood can be.

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

Satan delights equally in statistics and in quoting scripture.

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.

Patriotism has become a mere national self assertion, a sentimentality of flag-cheering with no constructive duties.

None but mothers know each other's feelings when we give up our daughters whom we love and cherish so tenderly to the mercies of a man, and perhaps even a stranger.