A father of science fiction and One World Government apostle
Social critic, journalist, prophetic futurist, and “A father of science fiction”; Wells—a prolific writer of novels, social commentary, and history—wrote more than 100 books. He envisioned the World Wide Web, nuclear weapons, satellite television, mass surveillance, and many other un-invented but now common technologies. He also explored both the positive an negative ways of integrating them into civilization. An outspoken socialist and proponent of equality and human rights, Wells had a strong influence on his friend Winston Churchill who peppered his speeches with Wells-quotes. Nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times, his influence extended to almost all modern science fiction writers. A strong believer in the need for us to become citizens of the world under a One World Government, he helped create the UN-adopted Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He worked hard on the creation of the League of Nations but disappointment with its effectiveness and inability of politicians to elevate the common-world good over their personal benefits led to his conjecture that it might be better for another species to replace humanity.
Living Philosophies, 1931
The Future in America, 1906
“When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race.”
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“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”
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“Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.”
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“Our true nationality is mankind.”
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“Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative. If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.”
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“There is no creed, no way of living left in the world at all, that really meets the needs of the time.”
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“All the main religions, patriotic, moral and customary systems in which human beings are sheltering today, appear to be in a state of jostling and mutually destructive movement, like the houses and palaces and other buildings of some vast, sprawling city overtaken by a landslide.”
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“Neither Gautama nor Lao Tzu nor Confucius had any inkling of this idea of a jealous God who would not tolerate any lurking belief in magic or old customs… The intolerance of the Jewish mind did keep its essential faith clear and clean”
from Outline of History
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“It is possible that in contact with western science, and inspired by the spirit of history, the original teachings of Gautama , revived and purified, may yet play a large part in the direction of human destiny”
from Outline of History
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“The idea of a Promise gave to Judaism a quality no previous or contemporary religion displayed; it made Judaism historical and dramatic. It justified its fierce intolerance…”
from Outline of History
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“After his death, Lao Tzu’s teachings were corrupted and overlaid by legends and had the most complex and extraordinary observances and superstitious ideas grafted upon them.”
from Outline of History
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“If men and women do not cling to their families nowadays as much as they did, it is because the state and the community supply now safety and help and facilities that were once only possible in the family group.”
from Outline of History
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“If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.”
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“Ashoka's reign was one of the brightest interludes in the troubled history of mankind... For 28 years he worked sanely for the real needs of men. Amidst the tens of thousands of names of monarchs that crowd the columns of history, the name of Asoka shines, and shines, almost alone, a star... the only military monarch on record who abandoned warfare after victory... his life was devoted to the spreading of Buddhism throughout the world.”
from Outline of History
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“The devil in the American world drama may be mercantilism, ensnaring, tempting, battling against my hero, the creative mind of man”
from The Future in America, 1906
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“What we may call the idea of Isocrates—the idea of a great union of the Greek states in Europe to dominate the Eastern world”
from Outline of History
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“Demosthenes, the Athenian demagogue and orator, a man of reckless rhetoric”
from Outline of History
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“If we look into the souls and thoughts of men, we shall find that this impressive display of material prosperity is merely the shining garment of a polity blind to things without and things within, and blind to the future.”
from Outline of History
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“The incuriousness—the complete absence of science—of the Roman rich and the Roman rulers was more massive and monumental even than their architecture... Rome was content to feast, exact, grow rich, and watch its' gladiatorial shows without the slightest attempt to learn anything of India, China, Persia, Buddha or Zoroaster...”
from Outline of History
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“Ovid and Horace challenge comparison with the best elegiac and lyric poets of Greece.”
from Outline of History
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“The prestige of Greek learning of an approved and settled type was as high in the Rome of Antoninus Pius as it was in the Oxford and Cambridge of Victorian England. The Greek scholar received the same mixture of unintelligent deference and practical contempt.”
from Outline of History
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“Gibbon's design for this great work demanded a prelude of splendor and tranquility and he makes the most of it in the sunny review of Antonines with which he opens. But he was far too shrewd and subtle not to qualify his apparent approval of the conditions he describes.”
from Outline of History
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“The complicated household of Muhammad was like an evil legacy... He was an illiterate Arab, ignorant of history, totally ignorant of all the political experience of Rome and Greece, and almost as ignorant of the real history of Judea; and he left his followers with no scheme for a stable government”
from Outline of History
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“Politically, Islam was not an advance but a retrogression from the traditional freedoms and customary laws of the desert... it's master has always been whatever man was vigorous and unscrupulous enough. Subject to revolts and assassinations, its final law has always been that man's will.”
from Outline of History
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“The very real spirit of democracy (using the word in its modern sense) pervades the essential teaching of Islam but Mohammad left no effective form to express this and his own rule was unlimited autocracy, and autocratic Islam has remained.”
from Outline of History
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“The Outline of History is an attempt to tell truly and clearly, in one continuous narrative, the whole story of life and mankind, so far as it is known today. It is written plainly for the general reader”
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“the renewed study of the Greek classics was bringing the creative and fertilizing spirit of Plato to pear upon the Western mind. In England, Sir Thomas More produced a quaint imitation of Plato's Repbulic in his Utopia, setting out a sort of autocratic communism”
from Outline of History
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“Winston Churchill, whose speeches were in themselves part of Britain’s defenses… and there had been no such complete enrollment of all citizens since the days of Sparta… But words, no more than money, win wars.”
from Outline of History
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“His life has some interesting parallelism with that of some of the more political of the Greek philosophers... He was far more of a constructive political thinker than the Buddha or Lao Tzu. His mind was full of the condition of China, and he sought to call the Aristocratic Man into existence very largely in order to produce the noble state.”
from Outline of History
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“With Sophocles came a third actor; the dialog and acting were developed and the chorus became subordinate to the dramatic action… Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides are the cultivating names of Greek tragedy, but now only the unmeaning names to the reader who will not seek out their work.”
from Outline of History
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“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?”
from Outline of History
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“early socialism was not at first at all 'democratic.' The democratic idea was mixed up with it later... its early form patriarchal... the first socialism was not a workers' movement; it was a masters' movement.”
from Outline of History
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“My idea of politics is an open conspiracy to hurry these tiresome, wasteful, evil things—nationality and war—out of existence; to end this empire and that empire, and set up one Empire of Man.”
from Living Philosophies, 1931
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“When Napoleon set up his brother Joseph upon the Spanish throne in 1810, the Washington of South America was General Bolivar and Spain was unable to suppress his revolt”
from Outline of History
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“Queen Hatasu... one of the most extraordinary and able of Egyptian monarchs”
from Outline of History
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“Rousseau, another outcast spirit, with his sentimental attack on formal morals and his sentimental idealization of nature and freedom, stands out as the master novelist of his time and country... [his] intellectual influence was on the whole demoralizing [and he] did much to popularize a sentimental and declamatory method of dealing with social and political problems.”
from Outline of History
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“Decartes, the greatest of French philosophers... is the central and dominant figure of a constellation of speculative minds which were active in undermining, modifying, and dwarfing the genteel Christianity of their age.”
from Outline of History
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“Some writers—impressed by the artificial splendors of the European courts—feel that Benjamin Franklin at the court of Louis XVI with his long hair, his plain clothes, and his pawky manner, was sadly lacking in aristocratic distinction. But, stripped to their personalities, Louis XVI was hardly gifted enough or noble minded enough to be Franklin's valet.”
from Outline of History
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“Buddha called men to self-forgetfulness five hundred years before Christ. In some ways he was near to us and our needs. Buddha was more lucid upon our individual importance in service than Christ, and less ambiguous upon the question of personal immortality... You see clearly a man, simple, devout, lonely, battling for light, a vivid human personality, not a myth.”
from Outline of History
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“Buddhism has done more for the advance of world civilization and true culture than any other influence in the chronicles of mankind... It is beyond all disputes the achievement of one of the most penetrating intelligence the world has ever known.”
from Outline of History
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“Another great deficiency of the democratic machinery of the Roman Republic was the absence of any general elementary political education at all... The ordinary Roman was not only blankly ignorant of the history of mankind but also of the conditions of foreign peoples”
from Outline of History
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“There was a thin, small stream of fine learning and of fine thinking up to the 1st century—witness Lucretius and Cicero—but it did not spread into the mass of the people... the broad principles of modern geology shine through the speculations of Lucretius; [but] the true figure to represent the classical Roman attitude to science is not Lucretius, but that Roman soldier who hacked Archimedes to death”
from Outline of History
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“Occam was insistent upon this separation of theology and practical truth—a separation which manifestly released scientific inquiry from dogmatic control.”
from Outline of History
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“Travels of Marco Polo is one of the great books of history. It opens this world of the 13th century to our imaginations— it led directly to the discovery of America... [it gave Columbus] an exaggerated idea of the extent of Asia... and this project of sailing into the sunset became the ruling purpose of his life.”
from Outline of History
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“Shakespeare was a man of keen humor and great sweetness of mind, who turned every sentence he wrote into melody. Elizabethan drama... found its extreme exponent in Shakespeare whose richest, subtlest passages are drawn from homely and even vulgar life.”
from Outline of History
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“the teaching of Confucius was not so overlaid, because it was limited and planin and straightforward and lent itself to no such distortions.”
from Outline of History
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“It scarcely needs criticism to bring home to me that much of my work has been slovenly, haggard and irritated, most of it hurried and inadequately revised, and some of it as white and pasty in its texture as a starch-fed nun”
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“It scarcely needs criticism to bring home to me that much of my work has been slovenly, haggard and irritated, most of it hurried and inadequately revised, and some of it as white and pasty in its texture as a starch-fed nun”
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“Mr Wells is a born storyteller who has sold his birthright for a pot of message.”
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“The flood of Wells’s prose lifted him from the respectable poverty in which he was raised to wealth and international fame... The problem he set himself was how to combine that mission, his furious devotion to human progress, with a cool certainty that the end of all progress would be entropy, devolution, nullity. The way he lived this paradox, even more than his books, is what makes Wells, still, an exemplary modern man.”
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“Writers who have had an easy start in life are usually second rate -- or at least, not quite first-rate. Dickens, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Shaw, H. G. Wells, are examples of the first-rate kind; in the twentieth century, John Galsworthy, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Samuel Beckett are examples of the second kind. They are far from being mediocre writers; yet they tend to be tinged with a certain pessimism that arises from never having achieved a certain resistance against problems.”
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“If the founding Fathers could come back, they would be amazed at the degree to which we have reduced poverty, drudgery, illiteracy, and governmental tyranny. a large part of the utopias described by Thomas More, Samuel Butler, Edward Bellamy, and H. G. Wells has been materially realized, along with the universal education, adult suffrage, freedom of speech, press, assembly, and religion which were among the hopes and dreams of 18th century philosophers.”
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“thinking people who were born about the beginning of this century are in some sense Wells’s own creation. . . . The minds of all of us, and therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed.”
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Comments (3)
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Shan Dao
6 years ago
"The Shakespeare of science fiction”— Brian Aldiss
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Shan Dao
6 years ago
"A worthy successor to Charles Dickens”—Vincent Brome
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Shan Dao
6 years ago
"the most important writer the genre has yet seen”—John Clute
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