H. G. Wells (1866–1946,) fully Herbert George Wells, was an English novelist, journalist, sociologist, and historian. His reputation rests on his pioneering science fiction books and comic novels. One of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century, Wells is regarded as the chief literary spokesperson of the liberal optimism that preceded World War I.
Born in Bromley, Kent, Wells studied biology with Thomas Henry Huxley and was a biology lecturer before becoming a novelist. He produced in 50 years a body of work that includes more than 40 novels, political, sociological, and philosophical treatises, textbooks and histories, autobiographies and biographies, journalism and letters, as well as his scientific romances and some 70 short stories.
The most artistically fruitful period of Wells’s career spans the first 15 years, during which time he wrote his best short fiction such as The Time Machine (1895,) The Invisible Man (1897,) and The War of the Worlds (1898,) and almost all of his collections of short stories. This combined political satire, warnings about the dangerous new powers of science, and hope for the future.
Wells’s realistic novels, considered his most exceptional achievement, include Tono-Bungay (1909) and The History of Mr. Polly (1910.) Among his other works are A Modern Utopia (1905) and The Outline of History (1920.) Experiment in Autobiography (1934) includes a striking self-portrait and studies of friends and contemporaries.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by H. G. Wells
Mankind which began in a cave and behind a windbreak will end in the disease-soaked ruins of a slum.
—H. G. Wells
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
The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Reflection, Past
The science hangs like a gathering fog in a valley, a fog which begins nowhere and goes nowhere, an incidental, unmeaning inconvenience to passers-by.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Economics
Let your love be stronger than your hate or anger. Learn the wisdom of compromise, for it is better to bend a little than to break.
—H. G. Wells
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
—H. G. Wells
In England we have come to rely upon a comfortable time-lag of fifty years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Correction, Reform
Human society is based on want. Life is based on want. Wild-eyed visionaries may dream of a world without need. Cloud-cuckoo-land. It can’t be done.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Desires
The crisis of yesterday is the joke of tomorrow.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Resilience, Crises, Tomorrow, Time, Jokes, The Future
No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.
—H. G. Wells
It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: The Future, Future
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