649 Quotes by H. G. Wells

In all the round world of Utopia there is no meat. There used to be. But now we cannot stand the thought of slaughter-houses. And, in a population that is all educated, and at about the same level of physical refinement, it is practically impossible to find anyone who will hew a dead ox or pig. We never settled the hygienic question of meat-eating at all. This other aspect decided us. I can still remember, as a boy, the rejoicings over the closing of the last slaughter-house.

But by that time Lady Harman had acquired the habit of reading and the habit of thinking over what she read, and from that it is an easy step to thinking over oneself and the circumstances of one’s own life. The one thing trains for the other.

At times I suffered 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.

In the middle of the night she woke up dreaming of huge white heads like turnips, that came trailing after her, at the end of interminable necks, and with vast black eyes. But being a sensible woman, she subdued her terrors and turned over and went to sleep again.

One may as well starve one’s body out of a place as to starve one’s soul in one.

It was all a monstrous payment for courageous fiction, a gratuity in return for the one reality of human life – illusion. We gave them a feeling of hope and profit; we sent a tidal wave of water and confidence into their stranded affairs... Civilization is possible only through confidence, so that we can bank our money and go unarmed about the streets.

It was a red-flannel chest-protector, one of those large quasi-hygienic objects that with pills and medicines take the place of beneficial relics and images among the Protestant peoples of Christendom.

It doesn’t follow that a nasty habit of mind is any less nasty because it’s ancestral. It doesn’t follow you can’t cure it. Why scratch fleas for ever? Gambling, speculation, is a social disease. It’s as natural and desirable as – syphilis...

There were half a dozen villas burning on the Woking border.