H. G. Wells

Few people who know of the work of Langley, Lilienthal, Pilcher, Maxim and Chanute but will be inclined to believe that long before the year 2000 A.D., and very probably before 1950, a successful aeroplane will have soared and come home safe and sound.

When a man realizes his littleness, his greatness can appear.

So it was that the war in the air began. Men rode upon the whirlwind that night and slew and fell like archangels. The sky rained heroes upon the astonished earth. Surely the last fights of mankind were the best. What was the heavy pounding of your Homeric swordsmen, what was the creaking charge of chariots, besides this swift rush, this crash, this giddy triumph, this headlong sweep to death?

Men who think in lifetimes are of little use to statesmanship.

The past is but the past of a beginning.

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.

So utterly at variance is Destiny with all the little plans of men.

We must be prepared to see an Association of Nations in conference growing into an organic system of world controls for world affairs and the keeping of the world’s peace, or we must be prepared for – a continuation of war.

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 all 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 immensities to the stars. And when he has conquered all the deep space, and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning.

Cycle trails will abound in Utopia.

... when the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people ... will hate the New World Order and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to evaluate its promise, we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people.

There comes a moment in the day when you have written your pages in the morning, attended to your correspondence in the afternoon, and have nothing further to do. Then comes that hour when you are bored; that's the time for sex.

It is the system of nationalist individualism that has to go....We are living in the end of the sovereign states....In the great struggle to evoke a Westernized World Socialism, contemporary governments may vanish....Countless people...will hate the new world order....and will die protesting against it.

The teacher, whether mother, priest, or schoolmaster, is the real maker of history.

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.

This is the end and the beginning of an age. This is something far greater than the French Revolution or the Reformation and we live in it.

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

I had just taken to reading. I had just discovered the art of leaving my body to sit impassive in a crumpled up attitude in a chair or sofa, while I wandered over the hills and far away in novel company and new scenes... My world began to expand very rapidly,... the reading habit had got me securely.

I am an historian, I am not a believer, but I must confess as a historian that this penniless preacher from Nazareth is irrevocably the very center of history. Jesus Christ is easily the most dominant figure in all history.

The new century will see changes that will dwarf those of the last.

Life, forever dying to be born afresh, forever young and eager, will presently stand upon this Earth as upon a footstool, and stretch out its realm amidst the stars.