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 a master, but an animal among the animals, under the Martian heel. With us it would be…
Book 1898
The War of the Worlds quotes
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About the book
A writer living quietly in the English countryside watches a strange cylinder fall from the sky near his home, and soon finds that Martians have come to take the Earth for themselves. As their machines march on London, he struggles to survive and find his wife amid a nation in panic. Wells’s novel helped create the alien invasion story and asks hard questions about empire and humanity’s place in the universe.
7 quotes
Lives insured and a bit invested for fear of accidents. And on Sundays—fear of the hereafter. As if hell was built for rabbits!
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. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human…
We have learned now that we cannot regard this planet as being fenced in and a secure abiding place for Man; we can never anticipate the unseen good or evil that may come upon us suddenly out of space.
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. And early in the…
This isn’t a war… It never was a war, any more than there’s war between man and ants.
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…