# Quote — H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

> 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. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same ... 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.

- Author: [H.G. Wells](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hg-wells.md)
- Book: [The War of the Worlds](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hg-wells/the-war-of-the-worlds.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/H._G._Wells#The_War_of_the_Worlds_(1898)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/hg-wells/the-war-of-the-worlds/no-one-would

## More from this book

> Night, the mother of fear and mystery, was coming upon me.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hg-wells/the-war-of-the-worlds/night-the-mother.md)

> And this Thing I saw! How can I describe it? A monstrous tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the young pine trees, and smashing them aside in its career; a walking engine of glittering metal, striding now across the heather; articulate ropes of steel dangling from it, and the clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the riot of the thunder.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hg-wells/the-war-of-the-worlds/and-this-thing.md)

> In another moment I had scrambled up the earthen rampart and stood upon its crest, and the interior of the redoubt was below me. A mighty space it was, with gigantic machines here and there within it, huge mounds of material and strange shelter places. And scattered about it, some in their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling-machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the Martians—dead!—slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hg-wells/the-war-of-the-worlds/in-another-moment.md)