H. G. Wells Quotes

Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound, or smell of it

Civilization both in the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish. It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out. It overtook the dynasties at the time of their senility, when they had reached the limit of their duration. It lessened their power and curtailed their influence. It weakened their authority. Their situation approached the point of annihilation and dissolution. Civilization decreased with the decrease of mankind. Cities and buildings were laid waste, roads and way signs were obliterated, settlements and mansions became empty, dynasties and tribes grew weak. The entire inhabited world changed

Blight is like a cancer. This is one of those all-or-nothing things.

Civilization is a disease which is almost invariably fatal.

Tuberculosis, starvation, fatigue, and there are many who have no desire to live.

How shrunk, how dwindled, in our times Creation's mighty seed - For Man has broke the Fellowship With murder, lust, and greed.

All Middlesex is ugly, notwithstanding the millions upon millionswhichit iscontinuallysucking up fromtherestof the kingdom.

Those who minister to poverty and disease are accomplices in the two worst of all the crimes.

At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.

It's more work to create poverty, disease and disharmony than it is to create health, harmony and abundance, because perfect health, harmony and abundance are the natural order of things.

Slumism is the pent-up anger of people living on the outside of affluence. Slumism is decay of structure and deterioration of the human spirit. Slumism is a virus which spreads through the body politic. As other "isms," it breeds disorder and demagoguery and hate.

But what does it mean, the plague? It's life, that's all.

The longest and most destructive party ever held is now into its fourth generation and still no one shows any signs of leaving. The problem of when the drink is going to run out is, however, going to have to be faced one day. The planet over which they are floating is no longer the planet it was when they first started floating over it. It is in bad shape

In fact, every place I've been to in Africa has a nice part, but you see the downside. Calcutta , parts of Central and South America , I've seen a lot of dead bodies and a lot of sad poverty and just obliteration.

Neither the Destruction of the Ninth Ward Nor the South Bronx Was Inevitable

A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.

With breathtaking rapidity, we are destroying all that was lovely to look at and turning America into a prison house of the spirit. The affluent society, with relentless single-minded energy, is turning our cities, most of suburbia and most of our roadways into the most affluent slum on earth.

Violence is a disease, a disease that corrupts all who use it regardless of the cause.

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

I am not quite sure what the advantage is in having a few more dollars to spend if the air is too dirty to breathe, the water too polluted to drink, the commuters are losing out in the struggle to get in and out of the city, the streets are filthy, and the schools so bad that the young perhaps wisely stay away, and the hoodlums roll citizens for some of the dollars they saved in the tax cut.

The AIDS epidemic, rather than being a scourge, is a welcome development in the inevitable reduction of human population... If it didn't exist, radical environmentalists would have to invent it.

The ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st century’s frontier.

My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.

Extreme poverty is the best breeding ground on earth for disease, political instability, and terrorism.

Ladies and Gentleman, the Bronx is burning.