Herbert George “H. G.” Wells was born in 1866 in Bromley, Kent, and died three weeks short of his 80th birthday in London in 1946.
H.G Wells commented on many subjects, as this selection of his eclectic quotes clearly demonstrates.
Wells was a prolific English writer in many genres, including the novel, history, politics, and social commentary. He even wrote textbooks and rules for war games. Today, he is best remembered for his science fiction novels, and has sometimes been called the father of science fiction.
His best known works are: The War of the Worlds,The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The Island of Doctor Moreau. Wells trained as a biologist which caused his thinking on ethical matters to be essentially Darwinian. Politically, he was an outspoken socialist, often sympathising with pacifist views. His later works became increasingly political and didactic, and he wrote little science fiction.
Wells’s literary reputation declined as he spent his later years promoting causes that were rejected by most of his contemporaries as well as younger authors whom he had previously influenced. In this connection, George Orwell described him as “too sane to understand the modern world.”
You can judge for yourself whether H.G.Wells was sane or not by browsing through these quotes:
- Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.
- Beauty is in the heart of the beholder.
- If we don’t end war, war will end us.
- Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
- The path of least resistance is the path of the loser.
- Advertising is legalized lying.
- What really matters is what you do with what you have.
- The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow.
- The uglier a man’s legs are, the better he plays golf – it’s almost a law.
- Leaders should lead as far as they can and then vanish. Their ashes should not choke the fire they have lit.
- Cynicism is humor in ill health.
- Some people bear three kinds of trouble – the ones they’ve had, the ones they have, and the ones they expect to have.
- The path of social advancement is, and must be, strewn with broken friendships.
- It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men’s lives should not pay with their own.
- Sailors ought never to go to church. They ought to go to hell, where it is much more comfortable.
H.G. Wells certainly had opinions on many things, as these quotes prove.
Have you ever read any of his work? Are you into science fiction as a genre?
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