The War of the Worlds quotes

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.

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.

“This isn’t a war,” said the artilleryman. “It never was a war, any more than there’s war between man and ants.”

— Spoken by a character

With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter.

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.

In the end the red weed succumbed almost as quickly as it had spread. A cankering disease, due, it is believed, to the action of certain bacteria, presently seized upon it. Now by the action of natural selection, all terrestrial plants have acquired a resisting power against bacterial diseases—they never succumb without a severe struggle, but the red weed rotted like a thing already dead.

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.

The immediate pressure of necessity has brightened their intellects, enlarged their powers, and hardened their hearts.

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

I was a battleground of fear and curiosity.

We can’t have any weak or silly. Life is real again, and the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die. They ought to die. They ought to be willing to die. It’s a sort of disloyalty, after all, to live and taint the race.

— Spoken by a character

They haven’t any spirit in them—no proud dreams and no proud lusts; and a man who hasn’t one or the other—Lord! What is he but funk and precautions?

— Spoken by a character

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

The man was running away with the rest, and selling his papers for a shilling each as he ran—a grotesque mingling of profit and panic.