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“Oswald Cabal: Little animals. And if we’re no more than animals, we must snatch each little scrap of happiness, and live, and suffer, and pass, mattering no more than all the other animals do or have done. It is this, or that. All the universe or nothing. Which shall it be, Passworthy? Which shall it be?”

H. G. Wells book The Shape of Things to Come

Things to Come (1936)

“And in the air are no streets, no channels, no point where one can say of an antagonist, "If he wants to reach my capital he must come by here." In the air all directions lead everywhere.”

H. G. Wells book The War in the Air

The War in the Air (1908)

“Each time I dip a living creature into the bath of burning pain, I say: 'This time I will burn out all the animal; this time I will make a rational creature of my own!' After all, what is ten years? Men have been a hundred thousand in the making.”

H. G. Wells book The Island of Doctor Moreau

Source: The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Ch. 14: Doctor Moreau Explains

“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.”

H. G. Wells book The World Set Free

The World Set Free

“I had rather be called a journalist than an artist.”

H. G. Wells

Letter to author Henry James (8 July 1915)

“Suppose, now, there is such a thing as an all-round inferior race. Is that any reason why we should propose to preserve it for ever…? Whether there is a race so inferior I do not know, but certainly there is no race so superior as to be trusted with human charges. The true answer to Aristotle’s plea for slavery, that there are “natural slaves,” lies in the fact that there are no “natural” masters… The true objection to slavery is not that it is unjust to the inferior but that it corrupts the superior. There is only one sane and logical thing to be done with a really inferior race, and that is to exterminate it. Now there are various ways of exterminating a race, and most of them are cruel. You may end it with fire and sword after the old Hebrew fashion; you may enslave it and work it to death, as the Spaniards did the Caribs; you may set it boundaries and then poison it slowly with deleterious commodities, as the Americans do with most of their Indians; you may incite it to wear clothing to which it is not accustomed and to live under new and strange conditions that will expose it to infectious diseases to which you yourselves are immune, as the missionaries do the Polynesians; you may resort to honest simple murder, as we English did with the Tasmanians; or you can maintain such conditions as conduce to “race suicide,” as the British administration does in Fiji. Suppose, then, for a moment, that there is an all-round inferior race… If any of the race did, after all, prove to be fit to survive, they would survive—they would be picked out with a sure and automatic justice from the over-ready condemnation of all their kind. Is there, however, an all-round inferior race in the world? Even the Australian black-fellow is, perhaps, not quite so entirely eligible for extinction as a good, wholesome, horse-racing, sheep-farming Australian white may think. These queer little races, the black-fellows, the Pigmies, the Bushmen, may have their little gifts, a greater keenness, a greater fineness of this sense or that, a quaintness of the imagination or what not, that may serve as their little unique addition to the totality of our Utopian civilisation. We are supposing that every individual alive on earth is alive in Utopia, and so all the surviving “black-fellows” are there. Every one of them in Utopia has had what none have had on earth, a fair education and fair treatment, justice, and opportunity…Some may be even prosperous and admired, may have married women of their own or some other race, and so may be transmitting that distinctive thin thread of excellence, to take its due place in the great synthesis of the future.”

H. G. Wells book A Modern Utopia

Source: A Modern Utopia (1905), Ch. 10, sect. 3

“I was invisible, and I was only just beginning to realise the extraordinary advantage my invisibility gave me. My head was already teeming with plans of all the wild and wonderful things I had now impunity to do.”

H. G. Wells book The Invisible Man

Source: The Invisible Man (1897), Chapter 20: At the House In Great Portland Street

“If I am something of a social leveller, it is not because I want to give silly people a good time, but because I want to make opportunity universal, and not leave out one single being who is worth while.”

H. G. Wells

"What I Believe", The Listener, 1929. Quoted in Clifton Fadiman, I Believe, London, George Allen and Unwin, 1940.

“And the ethical system of these men of the New Republic, the ethical system which will dominate the world state, will be shaped primarily to favour the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity—beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds, and a growing body of knowledge—and to check the procreation of base and servile types, of fear-driven and cowardly souls, of all that is mean and ugly and bestial in the souls, bodies, or habits of men. To do the latter is to do the former; the two things are inseparable. And the method that nature has followed hitherto in the shaping of the world, whereby weakness was prevented from propagating weakness, and cowardice and feebleness were saved from the accomplishment of their desires, the method that has only one alternative, the method that must in some cases still be called in to the help of man, is death. In the new vision death is no inexplicable horror, no pointless terminal terror to the miseries of life, it is the end of all the pain of life, the end of the bitterness of failure, the merciful obliteration of weak and silly and pointless things.”

H. G. Wells book Anticipations

Anticipations (1902)

“The New Deal is plainly an attempt to achieve a working socialism and avert a social collapse in America; it is extraordinarily parallel to the successive "policies" and "Plans" of the Russian experiment. Americans shirk the word "socialism", but what else can one call it?”

H. G. Wells book The New World Order

The New World Order (1939)

“Every man shall be entitled to a sound and objective education and there shall be genuine equality of opportunity. Education shall be a matter of environment as well as of instruction, and everyone shall be entitled to an education untouched by the interests of any party or religion.”

H. G. Wells

The Rights of Man, or what are we fighting for? (1940)

“If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.”

H. G. Wells

The Anatomy of Frustration (1936)

“The uglier a man's legs are, the better he plays golf. It's almost a law.”

H. G. Wells book Bealby

Bealby: A Holiday (1915)

“My mood, I say, was one of exaltation. I felt as a seeing man might do, with padded feet and noiseless clothes, in a city of the blind. I experienced a wild impulse to jest, to startle people, to clap men on the back, fling people's hats astray, and generally revel in my extraordinary advantage.”

H. G. Wells book The Invisible Man

Source: The Invisible Man (1897), Chapter 21: In Oxford Street

“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.”

H. G. Wells book The Outline of History

Source: The Outline of History (1920), Ch. 40

“He had developed in the most wonderful way the distinctive silliness of man without losing one jot of the natural folly of a monkey.”

H. G. Wells book The Island of Doctor Moreau

Source: The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Ch. 21: The Reversion of the Beast Folk

“An artist who theorizes about his work is no longer artist but critic.”

H. G. Wells

The Temptaion of Harringay (1929)

“At times I suffer 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.”

H. G. Wells book The War of the Worlds

Book I, Ch. 7: How I Reached Home
The War of the Worlds (1898)

“Adapt or perish, now as ever, is Nature's inexorable imperative.”

H. G. Wells

The Mind at the End of its Tether (1945), p. 19