H. G. Wells

“Our true nationality is mankind.”

“The only true measure of success is the ratio between what we might have done and what we might have been on the one hand, and the thing we have made and the things we have made of ourselves on the other.”

“Human history in essence is the history of ideas.”

“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?”

“A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own.”

“The past is the beginning of the beginning and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.”

“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.”

“Leaders should lead as far as they can and then vanish. Their ashes should not choke the fire they have lit.”

“Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.”

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

“Affliction comes to us, not to make us sad but sober; not to make us sorry but wise.”

“Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.”

“Sailors ought never to go to church. They ought to go to hell, where it is much more comfortable.”

“I must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea.”

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

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