649 Quotes by H. G. Wells

Could it be possible, I thought, that such a thing as the vivisection of men was carried on here? The question shot like lightning across a tumultuous sky; and suddenly the clouded horror of my mind condensed into a vivid realisation of my own danger.

I felt amazingly confident, – it’s not particularly pleasant recalling that I was an ass.

Man had been content to live in ease and delight upon the labours of his fellow-man, had taken Necessity as his watchword and excuse, and in the fullness of time Necessity had come home to him.

I suppose a suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder at what will come next as I felt then.

Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer, up to the very end of the nineteenth century, expressed any idea that intelligent life might have developed there far, or indeed at all, beyond its earthly level. Nor was it generally understood that since Mars is older than our earth, with scarcely a quarter of the superficial area and remoter from the sun, it necessarily follows that it is not only more distant from time’s beginning but nearer its end.

I was invisible, and I was only just beginning to realise the extraordinary advantage my invisibility gave me. My head was already teeming with plans of all the wild and wonderful things I had now impunity to do.

A door onbust is always open to bustin’, but ye can’t onbust a door once you’ve busted en.

But to me the future is still black and blank–is a vast ignorance, lit at a few casual places by the memory of his story. And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers –shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle–to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.

It is highly probable that the bulk of the Jew’s ancestors ‘never’ lived in Palestine ‘at all,’ which witnesses the power of historical assertion over fact.