H. G. Wells

"Raymond Passworthy: Oh, God, is there ever to be any age of happiness? Is there never to be any rest?"

"Oswald Cabal: Rest enough for the individual man, too much and too soon, and we call it death. But for Man, no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First, this little planet and its winds and ways. And then all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about him, and, at last, out across immensity to the stars. And when he has conquered all the depths of space, and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning..."

"Raymond Passworthy: But... we're such little creatures. Poor humanity's so fragile, so weak. Little... little animals."

"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?"

"There has been ... an enormous waste of human mental and physical resources in premature revolutionary thrusts, ill-planned, dogmatic, essentially unscientific reconstructions and restorations of the social order, during the past hundred years. This was the inevitable first result of the discrediting of those old and superseded mental adaptations which were embodied in the institutions and education of the past. They discredited themselves and left the world full of problems."

"We do not want dictators, we do not want oligarchic parties or class rule, we want a widespread world intelligence conscious of itself. To work out a way to that world brain organization is therefore our primary need in this age of imperative construction."

"Throughout the whole world we see variations of this same subordination of the individual to the organisation of power. Phase by phase these ill-adapted governments are becoming uncontrolled absolutisms; they are killing that free play of the individual mind which is the preservative of human efficiency and happiness. The populations under their sway, after a phase of servile discipline, are plainly doomed to relapse into disorder and violence. Everywhere war and monstrous economic exploitation break out, so that those very same increments of power and opportunity which have brought mankind within sight of an age of limitless plenty, seem likely to be lost again, it may be lost forever, in an ultimate social collapse."

"...there has accumulated a vast tangle of emergency legislation, regulations, barriers and restraints, out of all proportion to and often missing and distorting the needs of the situation. For the restoration and modernisation of human civilization, this exaggerated outlawing of the fellow citizen whom we see fit to suspect as a traitor or revolutionary and also of the stranger within our gates, has to be restrained and brought back within the scheme of human rights."

"Mr. Duff Cooper, landing at New York, cools his mind by blowing off about a forthcoming revolt of the German Army and a return to monarchy in Germany, a Holy Roman Empire, I suppose, leading that new Crusade of which the Pope has been talking about recent against anti-God Russia. But quite a lot of radical people in the world, in spite of the folly, stupidity and brutality of the Stalin–Molotov attack on Finland, are averse from this idea of a religious war against Socialism and Atheism."

"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."

"In politics, strangely enough, the best way to play your cards is to lay them face upwards on the table."

"When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race."

"Wells is the Prospero of all the brave new worlds of the mind, and the Shakespeare of science fiction."

"Wells occupies an honoured place in science fiction. Without him, indeed, I can't see how any of it could have happened."

"H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau is one of those books that, once read, is rarely forgotten."

"Mr. Wells is not shrinking back to a mossy political liberalism; he is expressing the clear-eyed conclusions of one abreast with his own latest experience. He has seen it demonstrated all over Europe and Asia that however much the world wants order, it cannot get it by mere violence and the magic of symbols. He has seen that however splendid fanatical dogmatism may feel internally to the possessor, it is the quickest way to chaos externally."

"In 1933, Einstein's works were among those burned in the book bonfires organized by the Nazis throughout Germany, together with those of such different anti-fascist writers as Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Freud, Proust, Hemingway, H. G. Wells, Gide, Upton Sinclair, etc."

""H. G." in his lifetime inspired countless thousands of the eager self-immolatory young with the faith that freedom-with-democracy-and-Socialism could be realised "in our time," as the ILP used to say...He was the leaven – the anarchic, human leaven – which prevented, and still prevents, our movement from becoming a soulless organisation."

"The influence of H. G. Wells on other science fiction writers is immeasurable. His work is widely known far beyond the boundaries of the genre, and to a great extent the creators of all novels and films of alien invasions, time travel, or invisibility are at least partly in his debt."

"Since the beginning of this war two men, whom we had thought of as slowly and unwillingly retiring from public life, have emerged into a glare of prominence. I mean Mr. Churchill and Mr. Wells. They must be nearly contemporary; they were both men of celebrity, I remember, when I was a freshman."

"Both have spoken and written a great deal in the last thirty-odd years; neither possesses what one could call a style, though each has a distinct idiom: that of Mr Wells being more like a durable boiler suit, and that of Mr. Churchill more like a court dress of rather tarnished grandeur from a theatrical costumier's."

"Wells' faith in knowledge and reason, in brief, excluded too large, too central a portion of human experience. He was for all that a very great figure of his epoch, a formative influence upon the minds and imagination of countless men and women, of society itself, and our debt to him cannot but be sincerely and gratefully acknowledged at this fateful moment of history in which we live and in some measure he foresaw."

"Whatever Wells writes is not only alive, but kicking."

"What a debt every intelligent being owes to Bernard Shaw! What a debt also to H. G. Wells, whose mind seems to have grown up alongside his readers', so that, in successive phases, be has delighted us and guided our imaginations from boyhood to maturity."

""Progress" is for the convinced ochlocrats a consoling Utopia of madly increased comfort and technicism. This charming but dull vision was always the pseudoreligious consolation of millions of ecstatic believers in ochlocracy and in the relative perfection and wisdom of Mr. and Mrs. Averageman. Utopias in general are surrogates for heaven; they give a meager solace to the individual that his sufferings and endeavors may enable future generations to enter the chiliastic paradise. Communism works in a similar way. Its millennium is almost the same as that of ochlocracy. The Millennium of Lenin, the Millennium of Bellamy, the Millennium as represented in H. G. Wells's, "Of Things to Come," the Millennium of Adolf Hitler and Henry Ford — they are all basically the same; they often differ in their means to attain it but they all agree in the point of technical perfection and the classless or at least totally homogeneous society without grudge or envy."

"I have no hestitation whatever in saying that Wells, as he is, entertains me far more agreeably than Dickens. I know very well that the author of David Copperfield was a greater artist than the author of Mr. Polly, just as I know that the Archbishop of Canterbury is a more virtuous man than my good friend, Fred the Bartender, ; but all the same, I prefer Wells and Fred to Dickens and the Archbishop."

"H.G. Wells, a great artist, was my favourite writer when I was a boy. The Passionate Friends, Ann Veronica, The Time Machine, The Country of the Blind, all these stories are far better than anything Bennett, or Conrad, or, in fact, any of Wells' contemporaries would produce. His sociological cogitations can be safely ignored, of course, but his romances and fantasies are superb."

"In spite of an awareness of possible world catastrophe that underlay much of his earlier work and flared up again in old age, Wells in his lifetime was regarded as the chief literary spokesman of the liberal optimism that preceded World War I. No other writer has caught so vividly the energy of this period, its adventurousness, its feeling of release from the conventions of Victorian thought and propriety. Wells's influence was enormous, both on his own generation and on that which immediately followed it. None of his contemporaries did more to encourage revolt against Christian tenets and accepted codes of behaviour, especially as regards sex, in which, both in his books and in his personal life, he was a persistent advocate of an almost complete freedom. Though in many ways hasty, ill-tempered, and contradictory, Wells was undeviating and fearless in his efforts for social equality, world peace, and what he considered to be the future good of humanity."

"The only political organisation Wells seems to have worked with successfully was PEN, for which he was International President between 1933 and 1936, and even then he was responsible for overseeing the expulsion of the German and Italian branches of the organisation due to their lack of respect for the free speech of non-fascist writers."

"To say that The Invisible Man is a young writer's novel is not to belittle it. It has much of the attractiveness of youth."

"It's silly for young men to announce themselves as new types of humanity. . .and then give you nothing but stale communism. Old H.G. Wells has more new ideas than the lot of them."

"It was Wells who made it respectable, even before World War I, for liberals in England and America to demean their own native democratic culture in the name of an imagined antidemocratic World State."

"In a talk at Oxford provocatively titled ‘Liberal Fascism,’ [Wells] called for liberalism to be ‘born again.’ After his customary denunciation of parliamentary politics as an anachronism, he let out his frustrations, calling for fascist means to serve liberal ends by way of a liberal elite as ‘conceited’ and as power-hungry as its rivals. ‘I suggest that you study the reinvigoration of Catholicism by Loyola,’ Wells said. ‘I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti.’ It was also to Communism that ‘we shall have to turn—we outsiders, that is, the young people with foresight for enlightened Nazis; I am proposing that you consider the formation for a greater Communist Party; a western response to Russia.’"

"In fact, the real problem with the thesis of A Genealogy of Morals is that the noble and the aristocrat are just as likely to be stupid as the plebeian. I had noted in my teens that major writers are usually those who have had to struggle against the odds -- to "pull their cart out of the mud," as I put it -- while writers who have had an easy start in life are usually second rate -- or at least, not quite first-rate. Dickens, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Shaw, H. G. Wells, are examples of the first kind; in the twentieth century, John Galsworthy, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Samuel Beckett are examples of the second kind. They are far from being mediocre writers; yet they tend to be tinged with a certain pessimism that arises from never having achieved a certain resistance against problems."