H. G. Wells

It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not pay with their own.

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.

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

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

After people have repeated a phrase a great number of times, they begin to realize it has meaning and may even be true.

Heresies are experiments in man's unsatisfied search for truth.

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

While there is a chance of the world getting through its troubles, I hold that a reasonable man has to behave as though he were sure of it. If at the end your cheerfulness in not justified, at any rate you will have been cheerful.

History is a race between education and catastrophe.

Human history in essence is the history of ideas.

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

Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.

There's nothing wrong in suffering, if you suffer for a purpose. Our revolution didn't abolish danger or death. It simply made danger and death worthwhile.

The doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, which was the main teaching of Jesus, is certainly one of the most revolutionary doctrines that ever stirred and changed human thought.

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.

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

We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century - for several centuries.

The uglier a man's legs are, the better he plays golf - it's almost a law.