Frases de Herbert George Wells

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“Vai chegar um momento no dia em que você já escreveu suas páginas pela manhã, respondeu a sua correspondência à tarde, e não tem mais nada para fazer. Então chega aquela hora que você fica entediado; esta é a hora para o sexo.”

“Crime e vidas ruins são a medida da falha do Estado, todo crime no final é o crime da comunidade.”

“O serpear da humanidade numa só comunidade não implica a criação de uma comunidade homogênea, mas o contrário; a utilização bem-vinda e adequada da qualidade distintiva numa atmosfera de entendimento… Comunidades com um só padrão, como caixas de soldados de brinquedo, são coisas do passado, do que do futuro.”

“A indignação moral é a inveja com uma auréola.”

“Os quatro Evangelhos, todos eles, dão-nos o retrato de uma personalidade muito definida, obrigando-nos a dizer: Esse homem existiu. Isso não pode ser inventado.”

“A história do mundo é, essencialmente, história de idéias.”

“Trata-se duma fantasia em escala astronomica sobre a futura humanidade, uma sinistra mistura de biologia e satira. O autor vê uma especie humana, depois de terriveis guerras, unificando-se afinal, sob o controle americano, em forma dum estado mundial - um estado ao tipo plutocratico que sofre uma incrivel degeneração moral e intelectual e desfecha numa nova Idade Media. O Homo sapiens é então exterminado pela catastrofe por ele mesmo provocada, e apenas uns tantos individuos sobrevivem obscuramente para se tornarem os progenitores de duas especies de Homo em conflito que imediatamente começam a propagar-se. As mais remotas especulações de Stapledon sobre a sucessão dos ultimos Hominideos e sua final extinção muito vivas e curiosas, não cabem, entretanto, aqui. Mas o livro estabelece a probabilidde da falencia da civilização contemporanea no barrar a guerra e evitar a catastrofe economica.”

“Em terra de cegos, quem tem um olho é rei.”

“Se você caiu ontem, fique de pé hoje.”

“Em todo o mundo da Utopia não ha carne. Antes havia. Mas agora não conseguimos suportar a ideia de matadouros. E numa população em que toda a gente é culta e como um nível de aperfeiçoamento físico semelhante, é praticamente impossível encontrar alguém que vá talhar um boi ou um porco morto. Nunca nos acostumamos com a questão higiénica do consumo de carne. Esse outro aspecto fez-nos decidir. Ainda me consigo lembrar, de quando era rapaz, do contentamento que o encerramento do ultimo matadouro gerou.”

“Um tempo quando todas as coisas boas serão para todos homens pode estar mais perto do que pensamos. Cada um que acredita que traz o bom tempo mais perto; cada coração que falha o atrasa.”

“A nossa verdadeira nacionalidade é a humanidade.”

“História humana na essência é história das idéias.”

“Quando aprendes alguma coisa, ao princípio sentes sempre que perdeste algo.”

“A crise de hoje é a anedota de amanhã.”

“Os ideais são o trajo de gala da alma.”

“O que realmente importa é o que fazes com o que tens.”

“Publicidade é mentira legalizada.”

“O amor é a coisa maior de todas, muito mais do que a própria fama.”

“A história da humanidade torna-se cada vez mais uma corrida entre a educação e a catástrofe.”

“Não acredito ter qualquer imortalidade. O maior mal no mundo, hoje, é a religião cristã.”

“Se ontem te sentiste caído, hoje é o dia para te levantares.”

“Sempre que vejo um adulto de bicicleta, volto a confiar no futuro da raça humana.”

“Não devemos permitir que o relógio e o calendário nos ceguem para o fato de que cada momento da vida é um milagre e um mistério.”

“O adultério é justificável: a alma necessita de poucas coisas; o corpo, muitas.”

“Brincar com o fogo desenvolve em nós a habilidade de não nos queimarmos.”

“Se não acabarmos com a guerra, a guerra acabará connosco.”

“Os crimes e as más vidas dão-nos a medida do fracasso de um Estado. Todos os crimes são, afinal, o crime de uma comunidade.”

“O caminho com menos obstáculos é o caminho do perdedor.”

“A grandeza de homem pode ser medida por “Aquilo que ele deixa para crescer, e se ele introduziu uma nova mentalidade com a certeza que perdurou após ele”. A julgar por este teste, Jesus ocupa o primeiro lugar.”

“It seemed to me that all over the world intelligent people were waking up to the indignity and absurdity of being endangered, restrained, and impoverished, by a mere uncritical adhesion to traditional governments, traditional ideas of economic life, and traditional forms of behaviour, and that these awaking intelligent people must constitute first a protest and then a creative resistance to the inertia that was stifling and threatening us. These people I imagined would say first, "We are drifting; we are doing nothing worth while with our lives. Our lives are dull and stupid and not good enough."”

“I believe that the crazy combative patriotism that plainly threatens to destroy civilisation to-day is very largely begotten by the schoolmaster and the schoolmistress in their history lessons. They take the growing mind at a naturally barbaric phase and they inflame and fix its barbarism.”

“A time when all such good things will be for all men may be coming more nearly than we think. Each one who believes that brings the good time nearer; each heart that fails delays it.”

“The third peculiarity of aerial warfare was that it was at once enourmously destructive and entirely indecisive.”

“It's this accursed science," I cried. "It's the very Devil. The medieval priests and persecutors were right and the Moderns are all wrong. You tamper with it—and it offers you gifts. And directly you take them it knocks you to pieces in some unexpected way. Old passions and new weapons—now it upsets your religion, now it upsets your social ideas, now it whirls you off to desolation and misery!”

“Great and strange ideas transcending experience often have less effect upon men and women than smaller, more tangible considerations.”

“You see, I went on with this research just the way it led me. That is the only way I ever heard of true research going. I asked a question, devised some method of obtaining an answer, and got — a fresh question. Was this possible or that possible? You cannot imagine what this means to an investigator, what an intellectual passion grows upon him! You cannot imagine the strange, colourless delight of these intellectual desires!”

“Humanity either makes, or breeds, or tolerates all its afflictions, great or small.”

“Human history is in essence a history of ideas.”

“An animal may be ferocious and cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie.”

“I was never a great amorist, though I have loved several people very deeply.”

“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.”

“And here one may note a curious comparison which can be made between this [ascidian] life-history and that of many a respectable pinnacle and gargoyle on the social fabric. Every respectable citizen of the professional classes passes through a period of activity and imagination, of "liveliness and eccentricity," of "Sturm und Drang." He shocks his aunts. Presently, however, he realizes the sober aspect of things. He becomes dull; he enters a profession; suckers appear on his head; and he studies. Finally, by virtue of these he settles down—he marries. All his wild ambitions and subtle æsthetic perceptions atrophy as needless in the presence of calm domesticity. He secretes a house, or "establishment," round himself, of inorganic and servile material. His Bohemian tail is discarded. Henceforth his life is a passive receptivity to what chance and the drift of his profession bring along; he lives an almost entirely vegetative excrescence on the side of a street, and in the tranquillity of his calling finds that colourless contentment that replaces happiness.”

“These creatures you have seen are animals carven and wrought into new shapes. To that, to the study of the plasticity of living forms, my life has been devoted. I have studied for years, gaining in knowledge as I go. I see you look horrified, and yet I am telling you nothing new. It all lay in the surface of practical anatomy years ago, but no one had the temerity to touch it.”

“For adaptations based on the novel see The War of the Worlds (disambiguation).”

“So indurated was I at that time to the abomination of the place, that I heard without a touch of emotion the puma victim begin another day of torture. It met its persecutor with a shriek, almost exactly like that of an angry virago.”

“I fell indeed into a morbid state, deep and enduring, and alien to fear, which has left permanent scars upon my mind. I must confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world when I saw it suffering the painful disorder of this island. A blind Fate, a vast pitiless Mechanism, seemed to cut and shape the fabric of existence; and I, Moreau (by his passion for research), Montgomery (by his passion for drink), the Beast People with their instincts and mental restrictions, were torn and crushed, ruthlessly, inevitably, amid the infinite complexity of its incessant wheels.”

“I had to act with the utmost circumspection to save myself from the suspicion of insanity. My memory of the Law, of the two dead sailors, of the ambuscades of the darkness, of the body in the canebrake, haunted me; and, unnatural as it seems, with my return to mankind came, instead of that confidence and sympathy I had expected, a strange enhancement of the uncertainty and dread I had experienced during my stay upon the island. No one would believe me; I was almost as queer to men as I had been to the Beast People. I may have caught something of the natural wildness of my companions. They say that terror is a disease, and anyhow I can witness that for several years now a restless fear has dwelt in my mind, such a restless fear as a half-tamed lion cub may feel.”

“I do not deny that force has to be used, but I think the forms of the struggle should fit as closely as possible to the opportunities presented by the existing laws, which must be defended against reactionary attacks. There is no need to disorganise the old system, because it is disorganising itself enough as it is. That is why it seems to me insurrection against the old orders, against the law, is obsolete, old-fashioned.”

“The authorities in Soviet Russia seem as timorous about subversive propaganda as Conservative old ladies in England. Russia is still a fastness of orthodoxy, even if the guardianship of orthodoxy has changed hands.”

“We want a common law for Africa, a general Declaration of Rights, of certain elementary rights, and we want a common authority to which the black man and the native tribe may appeal for justice.”