H. G. Wells Quotes
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Bah! The thing is not a nose at all, but a bit of primordial chaos clapped on to my face.
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Strength is the outcome of need.
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Cynicism is humor in ill health.
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It's no use locking the door after the steed is stolen.
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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.
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If Max [Aitken] gets to Heaven he won't last long. He will be chucked out for trying to pull off a merger between Heaven and Hell ... after having secured a controlling interest in key subsidiary companies in both places, of course.
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To be honest, one must be inconsistent.
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I believe that now and always the conscious selection of the best for reproduction will be impossible; that to propose it is to display a fundamental misunderstanding of what individuality implies. The way of nature has always been to slay the hindmost, and there is still no other way, unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmost being born. It is in the sterilization of failure, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies.
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Money means in a thousand minds a thousand subtly different, roughly similar, systems of images, associations, suggestions and impulses.
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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.
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And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers - shriveled 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 men.
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I don't suppose any man has ever understood any woman since the beginning of things. You don't understand our imaginations, how wild our imaginations can be.
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We have learned now that we cannot regard this planet as being fenced in and a secure abiding place for Man we can never anticipate the unseen good or evil that may come upon us suddenly out of space.
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It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.
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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.
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The world needs something stronger than any possible rebellion against its peace. In other words it needs a federal world government embodying a new conception of human life as one whole.
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Will is stronger than fact: it can mold and overcome fact.
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The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts from the east, and the showering white flakes in the air increased in number. From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives - all that was over.
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You cannot imagine the craving for rest that I feel-a hunger and thirst. For six long days, since my work was done, my mind has been a whirlpool, swift, unprogressive and incessant, a torrent of thoughts leading nowhere, spinning round swift and steady.
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Nothing remains interesting where anything may happen.
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The Jews looked for a special savior, a messiah, who was to redeem mankind by the agreeable process of restoring the fabulous glories of David and Solomon, and bringing the whole world at last under the firm but benevolent Jewish heel.
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When she was fifteen if you'd told her that when she was twenty she'd be going to bed with bald-headed men and liking it, she would have thought you very abstract.
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The great body of physical science, a great deal of the essential fact of financial science, and endless social and political problems are only accessible and only thinkable to those who have had a sound training in mathematical analysis, and the time may not be very remote when it will be understood that for complete initiation as an efficient citizen of one of the new great complex worldwide States that are now developing, it is as necessary to be able to compute, to think in averages and maxima and minima, as it is now to be able to read and write.
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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.
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To do such a thing would be to transcend magic. And I beheld, unclouded by doubt, a magnificent vision of all that invisibility might mean to a man—the mystery, the power, the freedom. Drawbacks I saw none. You have only to think! And I, a shabby, poverty-struck, hemmed-in demonstrator, teaching fools in a provincial college, might suddenly become—this.
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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.
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I felt the first inkling of a thing that presently grew quite clear in my mind, that oppressed me for many days, a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer a master, but an animal among the animals, under the Martian heel.With us it would be as with them, to lurk and watch, to run and hide; the fear and empire of man had passed away.
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The man who raises a fist has run out of ideas.
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But-! I say! The common conventions of humanity-' 'Are all very well for common people.
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I am prepared to maintain that Honesty is essentially an anarchistic and disintegrating force in society, that communities are held together and the progress of civilization made possible only by vigorous and sometimes even, violent Lying; that the Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie and humbug themselves and one another for the general Good.
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