649 Quotes by H. G. Wells

He liked to address every man in his own language, as a good European should.

Then I look about me at my fellow-men; and I go in fear. I see faces, keen and bright; others dull or dangerous; others, unsteady, insincere, – none that have the calm authority of a reasonable soul. I feel as though the animal was surging up through them;.

What a wonderfully complex thing! this simple seeming unity – the self!

It’s a beast of a country,” said the Voice. “And pigs for people.

We were not making war against Germany, we were being ordered about in the King’s war with Germany.

And even it seemed that I too was not a reasonable creature, but only an animal tormented with some strange disorder in its brain which sent it to wander alone, like a sheep stricken with gid.

The fever of war that would presently clog vein and artery, deaden nerve, and destroy brain, had yet to develop.

What is this spirit in man that urges him forever to depart from happiness and security, to toil, to place himself in danger, even to risk a reasonable certainty of death? It dawned upon me up there in the moon as a thing I ought always to have known, that man is not made simply to go about being safe and comfortable and well fed and amused. Against his interest, against his happiness he is constantly being driven to do unreasonable things. Some force not himself impels him and go he must.

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.