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The War of the Worlds QUOTES

The War of the Worlds QUOTES

1 " Be a man!... What good is religion if it collapses under calamity? Think of what earthquakes and floods, wars and volcanoes, have done before to men! Did you think that God had exempted [us]? He is not an insurance agent. "

― H.G. Wells , The War of the Worlds

2 " Suddenly, like a thing falling upon me from without, came fear. "

― H.G. Wells , The War of the Worlds

3 " Why are these things permitted? What sins have we done? The morning service was over, I was walking through the roads to clear my brain for the afternoon, and then—fire, earthquake, death! As if it were Sodom and Gomorrah! All our work undone, all the work— What are these Martians?
What are we? I answered, clearing my throat. "

― H.G. Wells , The War of the Worlds

4 " 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. "

― H.G. Wells , The War of the Worlds

5 " The chances of anything man-like on Mars are a million to one "

― H.G. Wells , The War of the Worlds

6 " For that moment I touched an emotion beyond the common range of men, yet one the poor brutes we dominate know only too well. I felt as a rabbit might feel returning to his burrow, and suddenly confronted by the work of a dozen busy navvies digging the foundations of a house. I felt the first inkling of a thing that presently grew quite clear in my mind, that oppressed me for many days, a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer master, but an animal among animals; under the Martian heel. "

― H.G. Wells , The War of the Worlds

7 " It's just men and ants. There's the ants builds their cities,live their lives, have wars, revolutions, until men want them out of the way, and then they go out of the way. That's what we are now _ just ants. "

― H.G. Wells , The War of the Worlds

8 " In the next place, wonderful as it seems in a sexual world, the Martians were absolutely without sex, and therefore without any of the tumultuous emotions that arise... "

― H.G. Wells , The War of the Worlds

9 " One may picture, too, the sudden shifting of the attention, the swiftly spreading coils and bellyings of that blackness advancing headlong, towering heavenward, turning the twilight to a palpable darkness, a strange and horrible antagonist of vapour striding upon its victims, men and horses near it seen dimly, running, shrieking, falling headlong, shouts of dismay, the guns suddenly abandoned, men choking and writhing on the ground, and the swift broadening-out of the opaque cone of smoke. And then night and extinction – nothing but a silent mass of impenetrable vapour hiding its dead. "

― H.G. Wells , The War of the Worlds

10 " No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. "

― H.G. Wells , The War of the Worlds

11 " This isn't a war," said the artilleryman. "It never was a war, any more than there's war between man and ants. "

― H.G. Wells , The War of the Worlds

12 " We must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians . . . were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space if fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit? "

― H.G. Wells , The War of the Worlds

13 " 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. "

― H.G. Wells , The War of the Worlds

14 " Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. "

― H.G. Wells , The War of the Worlds

15 " Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe swims. "

― H.G. Wells , The War of the Worlds

16 " For a time I believed that mankind had been swept out of existence, and that I stood there alone, the last man left alive. "

― H.G. Wells , The War of the Worlds

17 " So some respectable dodo in the Mauritius might have lorded it in his nest, and discussed the arrival of that shipful of pitiless sailors in want of animal food. “We will peck them to death tomorrow, my dear. "

― H.G. Wells , The War of the Worlds

18 " I was a battleground of fear and curiosity. "

― H.G. Wells , The War of the Worlds

19 " We will peck them to death to-morrow, my dear. "

― H.G. Wells , The War of the Worlds

20 " we should remember how repulsive our carnivorous habits would seem to an intelligent rabbit. "

― H.G. Wells , The War of the Worlds