“Comradeship is quite a different thing from friendship. . .”
– Illustrated London News, May 19, 1906
“Because our expression is imperfect we need friendship to fill up the imperfections.”
– Illustrated London News, June 6, 1931
“. . . For friendship implies individuality; whereas comradeship really implies the temporary subordination, if not the temporary swamping of individuality. Friends are the better for being two; but comrades are the better for being two million.”
– “A Case of Comrades,” The Apostle and the Wild Ducks
“Only friendliness produces friendship. And we must look far deeper into the soul of man for the thing that produces friendliness.”
– “Wells and the World State,” What I Saw In America
“It is not merely true that a creed unites men. Nay, a difference of creed unites men – so long as it is a clear difference. A boundary unites. Many a magnanimous Moslem and chivalrous Crusader must have been nearer to each other, because they were both dogmatists, than any two agnostics. “I say God is One,” and “I say God is One but also Three,” that is the beginning of a good quarrelsome, manly friendship.”
– “The New Hypocrite,” What’s Wrong with the World
“A queer and almost mad notion seems to have got into the modern head that, if you mix up everybody and everything more or less anyhow, the mixture may be called unity, and the unity may be called peace. It is supposed that, if you break down all doors and walls so that there is no domesticity, there will then be nothing but friendship. Surely somebody must have noticed by this time that the men living in a hotel quarrel at least as often as the men living in a street.”
– Illustrated London News, Sept. 8, 1917
“These are the things which might conceivably and truly make men forgive their enemies. We can only turn hate to love by understanding what are the things that men have loved; nor is it necessary to ask men to hate their loves in order to love one another. Just as two grocers are most likely to be reconciled when they remember for a moment that they are two fathers, so two nationals are most likely to be reconciled when they remember (if only for a moment) that they are two patriots.”
– Illustrated London News, June 4, 1921