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.
The new century will see changes that will dwarf those of the last.
Biologists can be just as sensitive to heresy as theologians.
He was inordinately proud of England and he abused her incessantly.
There is no remorse like a remorse of chess. It is a curse upon man. There is no happiness in 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.
States organized for war will make war as surely as hens will lay eggs...
I went over the heads of the things a man reckons desirable. No doubt invisibility made it possible to get them, but it made it impossible to enjoy them when they are got.
By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain.
There is, though I do not know how there is or why there is, a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven.
Room to swing a cat, it seemed was absolutely essential. It was an infrequent but indispensable operation.
Are we all bubbles blown by a baby?
There’s truths you have to grow into.
Only people who are well off can be – complex.
With wine and food, the confidence of my own table, and the necessity of reassuring my wife, I grew by insensible degrees courageous and secure.
An animal may be ferocious and cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie.
The art of ignoring is one of the accomplishments of every well-bred girl, so carefully instilled that at last she can even ignore her own thoughts and her own knowledge.
And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers – shriveled now, and brown and flat and brittle – to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of men.
If only I had thought of a Kodak! I could have flashed that glimpse of the Under-world in a second, and examined it at leisure.
After telephone, kinematograph and phonograph had replaced newspaper, book schoolmaster and letter, to live outside the range of the electric cables was to live an isolated savage.
I see knowledge increasing and human power increasing. I see ever-increasing possibilities before life, And I see no limits set to it at all, Existence impresses me as a perpetual dawn. Our lives, as I apprehend, are great in expectations.