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H. G. Wells

33 free books by H. G. Wells. 33 you can read right here.

Born 1866 in Bromley · Died 1946 in London

writer, novelist, screenwriter, journalist · United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

Notable works: The Outline of History, The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The Island of Dr Moreau, The War of the Worlds

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Facts from Wikidata (Q42511), retrieved 2026-09-26.

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Short stories and shorter works by H. G. Wells

Quotes from H. G. Wells’s books

Verified word for word in the text: each quote is copied exactly from the book’s text in this site’s reader (the Project Gutenberg e-text named under each book) and links to its passage; when this page was built, every quote was checked word for word against that text. How RedLectern is built.

The Time Machine

From Project Gutenberg e-text #35 (public domain in the USA).

We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity, and it seemed to me that here was that hateful grindstone broken at last!

— Spoken by a character · VI. The Sunset of Mankind

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Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness.

— Spoken by a character · VI. The Sunset of Mankind

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The War of the Worlds

From Project Gutenberg e-text #36 (public domain in the USA).

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.

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And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races.

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