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Wikipedia Summary for H. G. Wells
Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946) was an English writer. Prolific in many genres, he wrote dozens of novels, short stories, and works of social commentary, history, satire, biography and autobiography. His work also included two books on recreational war games. Wells is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and is often called the "father of science fiction", along with Jules Verne and the publisher Hugo Gernsback.
During his own lifetime, however, he was most prominent as a forward-looking, even prophetic social critic who devoted his literary talents to the development of a progressive vision on a global scale. A futurist, he wrote a number of utopian works and foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web. His science fiction imagined time travel, alien invasion, invisibility, and biological engineering. Brian Aldiss referred to Wells as the "Shakespeare of science fiction".
Wells rendered his works convincing by instilling commonplace detail alongside a single extraordinary assumption – dubbed “Wells's law” – leading Joseph Conrad to hail him in 1898 as "O Realist of the Fantastic!". His most notable science fiction works include The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898) and the military science fiction The War in the Air (1907). Wells was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times.
Wells's earliest specialised training was in biology, and his thinking on ethical matters took place in a specifically and fundamentally Darwinian context. He was also an outspoken Socialist from a young age, often (but not always, as at the beginning of the First World War) sympathising with pacifist views. His later works became increasingly political and didactic, and he wrote little science fiction, while he sometimes indicated on official documents that his profession was that of journalist. Novels such as Kipps and The History of Mr Polly, which describe lower-middle-class life, led to the suggestion that he was a worthy successor to Charles Dickens, but Wells described a range of social strata and even attempted, in Tono-Bungay (1909), a diagnosis of English society as a whole. Wells was a diabetic and co-founded the charity The Diabetic Association (known today as Diabetes UK) in 1934.
There is no intelligence where there is no need of change.
Given as much law as that man will be able to do anything and go anywhere, an the only trace of pessimism left in the human prospect today is a faint flavour that one was born so soon.
Here these fools-I'm trying to conquer a new element-trying to do a thing that will revolutionise life. And instead of taking an intelligent interest, they grin and make their stupid jokes, and call me and my appliances names.
Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write.
That's the way with all you religious people. It's all a business of inducements. Cannot a man seek after righteousness for righteousness' sake?
Men are killed outright in the reserves sometimes, while others who have been left for dead in the thickest corner crawl out and survive.
I cannot consider anything. Professors in this College are machines. The Regulations will not even let us recommend our students for appointments. I am a machine, and you have worked me. I have to do .
Chess is a curse upon a man.
The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities and businesses and economic relations, shook them also out of their old-established habits of thought, and out of the lightly held beliefs and prejudices that came down to them from the past.
Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the early twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands.
If anything is possible, then nothing is interesting.
Are we all bubbles blown by a baby?
To ride a bicycle properly is very like a love affair-chiefly it is a matter of faith. Believe you do it, and the thing is done; doubt, and, for the life of you, you cannot.
The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.
Cycle trails will abound in Utopia.
Our challenge is not to educate the children we used to have or want to have, but to educate the children who come to the schoolhouse door.
There is no reason whatever to believe that the order of nature has any greater bias in favour of man than it had in favour of the ichthyosaur or the pterodactyl.
Hinduism is synonymous with humanism. That is its essence and its great liberating quality.
When the mind grapples with a great and intricate problem, it makes its advances step by step, with but little realization of the gains it has made, until suddenly, with an effect of abrupt illumination, it realizes its victory.
The professional military mind is by necessity an inferior and unimaginative mind; no man of high intellectual quality would willingly imprison his gifts in such a calling.
A young mistress is better than an old master.
There is no upper limit to what individuals are capable of doing with their minds. There is no age limit that bars them from beginning. There is no obstacle that cannot be overcome if they persist and believe.
I do not propose to add anything to what has already been written concerning the loss of the Lady Vain.
There is, though I do not know how there is or why there is, a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven.
There is no remorse like a remorse of chess. It is a curse upon man. There is no happiness in chess.
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.
IBM is helping to greatly advance and expedite quality sampling while providing our project investigators peace of mind that the information they are gathering is securely stored and protected.
Patriotism has become a mere national self assertion, a sentimentality of flag-cheering with no constructive duties.
It's no use locking the door after the steed is stolen.
It's against reason, said Filby. What reason? said the Time Traveller.
Man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him.
There's nothing wrong in suffering, if you suffer for a purpose. Our revolution didn't abolish danger or death. It simply made danger and death worthwhile.
When the history of civilization is written, it will be a biological history and Margaret Sanger will be its heroine.
If after all my Atheology turns out wrong and your Theology right I feel I shall always be able to pass into Heaven (if I want to) as a friend of G.K.C.'s. Bless you.
The voice was indisputable. It continued to swear with that breadth and variety that distinguishes the swearing of a cultivated man.
How small the vastest of human catastrophes may seem, at a distance of a few million miles.
This World Youth movement claims to represent and affect the politico-social activities of a grand total of forty million adherents -- under the age of thirty...It may play an important and increasing role in the consolidation of a new world order.
I am for world-control of production and of trade and transport, for a world coinage, and the confederation of mankind. I am for the super-State.
Fools make researches and wise men exploit them.
'It is love and reason,' I said, 'fleeing from all this madness of war.'
Science has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use. It is time she held her hand.
The brain upon which my experiences have been written is not a particularly good one. If their were brain-shows, as there are cat and dog shows, I doubt if it would get even a third class prize.
The greatest task of democracy, its ritual and feast -- is choice.
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.
It is the going out from oneself that is love and not the accident of its return. It is the expedition, whether it fail or succeed.
It is not much good thinking of a thing unless you think it out.
Life falls into place only with God.
States organized for war will make war as surely as hens will lay eggs.
I saw a gray-haired man a figure of hale age, sitting at a desk and writing.
For all my desire to be interesting, I have to confess that for most things and people I don't give a damn.
Everywhere in the world there are ignorance and prejudice, but the greatest complex of these, with the most extensive prestige and the most intimate entanglement with traditional institutions, is the Roman Catholic Church.
Instead of offering me a Garibaldi biscuit, she asked me with that faint lisp of hers, to 'have some squashed flies, George'.
Very much indeed of what we call moral education is such an artificial modification and perversion of instinct; pugnacity is trained into courageous self-sacrifice, and suppressed sexuality into religious emotion.
Strength is the outcome of need.
Longer Version:
Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness.
The passion for playing Chess is one of the most unaccountable in the world.
Longer Version:
The passion for playing chess is one of the most unaccountable in the world. It slaps the theory of natural selection in the face. It is the most absorbing of occupations. The least satisfying of desires. A nameless excrescence upon life. It annihilates a man. You have, let us say, a promising politician, a rising artist that you wish to destroy. Dagger or bomb are archaic and unreliable -- but teach him, inoculate him with chess.
Success is to be measured not by wealth, power, or fame, but by the ratio between what a man is and what he might be.
An animal may be ferocious and cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie.
The future is the shape of things to come.
I want to go ahead of Father Time with a scythe of my own.
Once you lose yourself, you have two choices: find the person you used to be, or lose that person completely.
For after the Battle comes quiet.
It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble.
By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain.
This isn't a war, said the artilleryman. It never was a war, any more than there's war between man and ants.
I never yet heard of a useless thing that was not ground out of existence by evolution sooner or later. Did you? And pain gets needless.
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.
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.
No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.
I do not believe I have any immortality. The greatest evil in the world today is the Christian religion.
We were not making war against Germany, we were being ordered about in the King's war with Germany.
Face this world. Learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end you will find clues to it all.
I perceived that I was hungry, and prepared to clamber out of the hammock which, very politely anticipating my intention, twisted round and deposited me upon the floor.
In the scientific world I find just that disinterested devotion to great ends that I hope will spread at last through the entire range of human activity.
I see knowledge increasing and human power increasing, I see everincreasing possibilities before life, and I see no limits set to it all. Existence impresses me as a perpetual dawn. Our lives, as I apprehend them, swim in expectation.
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.
Non-violence is the policy of the vegetable kingdom.
I went over the heads of the things a man reckons desirable. No doubt invisibility made it possible to get them, but it made it impossible to enjoy them when they are got.
With wine and food, the confidence of my own table, and the necessity of reassuring my wife, I grew by insensible degrees courageous and secure.
We will peck them to death tomorrow, my dear.
Lies are the mortar that binds the savage individual man into the social masonry.
If there is no God, nothing matters. If there is a God, nothing else matters.
Christ is the most unique person of history. No man can write a history of the human race without giving first and foremost place to the penniless Teacher of Nazareth.
Every time Europe looks across the Atlantic to see the American Eagle, it observes only the rear end of an ostrich.
All four Gospels agree in giving us a picture of a very definite personality. One is obliged to say, Here was a man. This could not have been invented.
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.
Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough -- -as most wrong theories are!
Satan delights equally in statistics and in quoting scripture.
Better it is toward the right conduct of life to consider what will be the end of a thing, than what is the beginning of it: for what promises fair at first may prove ill, and what seems at first a disadvantage, may prove very advantageous.
Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write!
The Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie to and humbug themselves for the general Good. Lies are the mortar that bind the savage individual man into the social masonry.
Tell the truth and read story books;it will take you to the magical moment in a glory night.