The War of the Worlds war quotes

• ‘To carry warfare sunward is, indeed, their only escape from the destruction that, generation after generation, creeps upon them.’
• ‘Many people had heard of the cylinder, of course, and talked about it in their leisure, but it certainly did not make the sensation that an ultimatum to Germany would have done.’
• ‘I must confess the sight of all this armament, all this preparation, greatly excited me. My imagination became belligerent, and defeated the invaders in a dozen striking ways; something of my schoolboy dreams of battle and heroism came back.’
• ‘Never before in the history of warfare had destruction been so indiscriminate and so universal.’
• ‘Every minute a fresh gun came into position until, before twilight, every copse, every row of suburban villas on the hilly slopes about Kingston and Richmond, masked an expectant black muzzle.’
• ‘And the touch of that vapour, the inhaling of its pungent wisps, was death to all that breathes.’
• ‘Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered together.’
• ‘For a time I believed that mankind had been swept out of existence, and that I stood there alone, the last man left alive.’
• ‘"This isn't a war," said the artilleryman. "It never was a war, any more than there's war between man and ants."’
• ‘If the Martians can reach Venus, there is no reason to suppose that the thing is impossible for men, and when the slow cooling of the sun makes this earth uninhabitable, as at last it must do, it may be that the thread of life that has begun here will have streamed out and caught our sister planet within its toils.’