The true strength of rulers and empires lies not in armies or emotions, but in the belief of men that they are inflexibly open and truthful and legal. As soon as a government departs from that standard it ceases to be anything more than “the gang in possession,” and its days are numbered.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Government
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.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Success & Failure, Success
Advertising is legalized lying.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Media, Advertising
Cynicism is humor in ill health.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Cynicism
I want to go ahead of Father Time with a scythe of my own.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Time, Time Management
Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Just for Fun, Driving, Future
It is good to be a part of life. Just as a sundial counts only the sunny hours, so does life know only that it is living.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Life
He was inordinately proud of England and he abused her incessantly.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Patriotism
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Morality, Hypocrisy, Morals
The religion of the atheist has a God-shaped blank at it’s heart
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Atheism
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. The three or four year’ course of lectures, the bachelor who know some, the master who knows most, the doctor who knows all, are ideas that have come down unimpaired from the Middle Ages. Nowadays no one should end his learning while he lives and these university degrees are preposterous. It is true that we have multiplied universities greatly in the past hundred years, but we seem to have multiplied them altogether too much upon the old pattern.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Education
Human history in essence is the history of ideas.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: History, Historians
To be honest, one must be inconsistent.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Change, Forgiveness, Consistency
Biologically the species is the accumulation of the experiments of all its successful individuals since the beginning.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Evolution
Religion is the first thing and the last thing, and until a man has found God and been found by God, he begins at no beginning, he works to no end.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Religion
Humanity either makes, or breeds, or tolerates all its afflictions, great or small.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Suffering
First we shall want the pupil to understand, speak, read, and write his mother tongue well.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Education
The crisis of yesterday is the joke of tomorrow.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Jokes, Tomorrow, Time, Resilience, The Future, Crises
War is a curtain of dense black fabric across all the hopes and kindliness of mankind. Yet always it has let through some gleams of light, and not—I am not dreaming—it grows threadbare, and here and there and at a thousand points the light is breaking through.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Peace
Humanity either makes, or breeds, or tolerates all its afflictions.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Adversity
Mankind which began in a cave and behind a windbreak will end in the disease-soaked ruins of a slum.
—H. G. Wells
When a man realizes his littleness,
his greatness can appear.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Self-Knowledge
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.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Joy
Moral indignation is just jealousy with a halo around it.
—H. G. Wells
The uglier a man’s legs are, the better he plays golf—it’s almost a law.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Golf
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.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Sex, Humankind
You have learned something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Learning
Hunger makes a fool of a man.
—H. G. Wells
History is a race between education and catastrophe.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Historians, History
His studies were pursued but never effectually overtaken.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Learning
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Rudyard Kipling British Children’s Books Writer
- Doris Lessing British Novelist, Poet
- Gladys Bronwyn Stern British Novelist
- Graham Greene British Novelist
- Winston Churchill British Head of State
- Agatha Christie British Novelist
- Bertrand A. Russell British Philosopher, Mathematician
- Arnold Bennett British Novelist
- Israel Zangwill English Writer, Political Activist
- Dodie Smith British Novelist
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