Talk:H. G. Wells

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I find Elasah Drogin, Margaret Sanger: Father of Modern Society (New Hope, KY: CUL Publications, 1986), p. 38. and also Time Magazine, 1998 (http://205.188.238.181/time/archive/preview/0,10987,988152,00.html) sited for the quote about Margaret Sanger. 1931 and 1935 are about equally cited, with the quote split between those years in one case. I also find -- H. G. Wells, in Douglas, Margaret Sanger: Pioneer of the Future, pp. 142-3, quoted from Annie Laurie Gaylor, Women Without Superstition. David R. Ingham 17:56, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Now I find a definite source:

In remaining years Sanger often quoted Wells, and turned his tributes to her into a definitive authorization of her work. When supporters sent quotations praising Sanger to the Nobel Committee in Stockholm in an unsuccessful nomination effort for the Peace Prize, Wells' words resonated above all others: "When the history of our civilization is written, it will be a biological history and Margaret Sanger will be its heroine" (from a 1935 speech at Barber's Hall, London, included in Round the World for Birth Control, Birth Control International Information Centre, 1937, MSM S62:598).

[edit] France and priests

I cannot find a source for this one: "I daren't drive a car in France, the temptation to run over a priest would be to great to resist"

Alan Liefting 21:56, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

I remember words to this effect being quoted by Kenneth Clark in Civilisation. I've found the passage, which is as follows:

"I remember H. G. Wells, who was a kind of twentieth-century Voltaire, saying that he daren't drive a car in France, because the temptation to run over a priest would be too strong for him."
— Kenneth Clark, Civilisation (1969), ch. 10: The Smile of Reason.

Since this reads like a paraphrase rather than a quote, however, it doesn't tell us what Wells actually said or where Clark believed he had heard it. - InvisibleSun 22:18, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Unsourced

Wikiquote no longer allows unsourced quotations, and they are in process of being removed from our pages (see Wikiquote:Limits on quotations); but if you can provide a reliable and precise source for any quote on this list please move it to H. G. Wells. --Antiquary 11:15, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

• Advertising is legalized lying. - -- H.G. Wells, quoted in Michael Jackman, Crown's Book of Political Quotations, 1982, New York: Crown Publishing Inc., p. 2.

• Beauty is in the heart of the beholder.

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

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

• It's not true that the more sex that you have, the more it interferes with your work. I find that the more sex you have, the better work you do.

• No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.

• Once the command of the air is obtained by one of the contending armies, the war becomes a conflict between a seeing host and one that is blind.

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

• Some people bear three kinds of trouble - the ones they've had, the ones they have, and the ones they expect to have.

• 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.

• The path of least resistance is the path of the loser.

• We must not allow the clock and the calendar to blind us to the fact that each moment of life is a miracle and mystery.

• 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 is not justified, at any rate you will have been cheerful.

• There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection.