Herbert George Wells (September 21, 1866 - August 13, 1946) English writer

Sourced

• The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is or has been is but the twilight of the dawn.
  • The Discovery of the Future (1901)

• There comes a moment in the day when you have written your pages in the morning, attended to your correspondence in the afternoon, and have nothing further to do. Then comes that hour when you are bored; that’s the time for sex.
  • Quoted in Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography (1964)

The Outline of History (1920)

• The weaving of mankind into one community does not imply the creation of a homogeneous community, but rather the reverse; the welcome and adequate utilization of distinctive quality in an atmosphere of understanding... Communities all to one pattern, like boxes of toy soldiers, are things of the past, rather than of the future.

• A time when all such good things will be for all men may be coming more nearly than we think. Each one who believes that brings the good time nearer; each heart that fails delays it.

• Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe... Yet, clumsily or smoothly, the world, it seems, progresses and will progress.

• Life begins perpetually. Gathered together at last under the leadership of man, the student-teacher of the universe... and with knowledge as yet beyond dreaming, Life, forever dying to be born afresh, for ever young and eager, will presently stand upon this earth as upon a footstool, and stretch out it's realm amidst the stars.

Attributed

• 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.

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

• Advertising is legalized lying.

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

• In the air are no streets, no channels, no point where one can say of an antagonist, "If he wants to reach my capital he must come by here." In the air all directions lead everywhere.

• Beauty is in the heart of the beholder.

• 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.

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

• Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia.

• Cynicism is humor in ill health.

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

• Exuberance is beauty.

• Fools make researches and wise men exploit them.

• He was inordinately proud of England and he abused her incessantly.

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

• Human history in essence is the history of ideas.

• Humanity either makes, or breeds, or tolerates all its afflictions, great or small.

• If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.

• 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.

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

• It's not true that the more sex that you have, the more it interferes with your work. I find that the more sex you have, the better work you do.

• 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.

• Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.

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

• 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.

• Our true nationality is mankind.

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

• Security puts a premium on feebleness.

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

• The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow.

• The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it. (1903)

• 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?

• 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.

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

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

• The third peculiarity of aerial warfare was that it was at once enormously destructive and entirely indecisive.

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

• There comes a moment in the day when you have written your pages in the morning, attended to your correspondence in the afternoon, and have nothing further to do. Then comes that hour when you are bored; that's the time for sex.

• 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.

• 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.

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

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

• 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.

• You have learned something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.