The fact is, the Time Traveller was one of those men who are too clever to be believed: you never felt that you saw all round him; you always suspected some subtle reserve, some ingenuity in ambush, behind his lucid frankness.
You must follow me carefully. I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted. The geometry, for instance, they taught you at school is founded on a misconception.
Patriotism has become a mere national self assertion, a sentimentality of flag-cheering with no constructive duties.
In the scientific world I find just that disinterested devotion to great ends that I hope will spread at last through the entire range of human activity.
The greatest task of democracy, its ritual and feast – is choice.
Science has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use. It is time she held her hand.
I want to go ahead of Father Time with a scythe of my own.
I must confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world.
We are always getting away from the present moment. Our mental existence, which are immaterial and have no dimensions, are passing along the Time-Dimension with a uniform velocity from the cradle to the grave.
We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity.
Losing your way on a journey is unfortunate. But, losing your reason for the journey is a fate more cruel.
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.
In England we have come to rely upon a comfortable time-lag of fifty years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it.
One of the darkest evils of our world is surely the unteachable wildness of the Good.
It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men’s lives should not pay with their own.
I would rather be called a journalist than an artist.
The path of social advancement is, and must be, strewn with broken friendships.
The past is the beginning of the beginning and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.
I must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea.
Heresies are experiments in man’s unsatisfied search for truth.