Life & Wisdom Quote by H.G. Wells

Wells is skewering the way slogans launder themselves into “truth” through sheer repetition. The bite is in that casual “may even be true”: he’s not denying reality outright, he’s mocking how easily we outsource our sense-making to a chorus. Say something often enough and it stops sounding like a claim and starts feeling like background music. The mind, craving coherence, retrofits meaning onto familiar noise.

The intent is less about language as poetry than language as technology - a social instrument that can program belief. Wells wrote in an era when mass newspapers, advertising, and propaganda were rapidly professionalizing; public opinion was becoming something you could manufacture at scale. That context matters. He’s observing an early version of the feedback loop that modern media perfected: repetition creates recognition; recognition breeds trust; trust smuggles in assent.

Subtext: people don’t just accept repeated phrases because they’re gullible. They accept them because repetition reduces cognitive friction. Familiarity reads as safety; a well-worn phrase offers membership, a shorthand that signals you’re on the right side of the room. Wells implies a quiet danger: once a phrase becomes a social password, challenging it isn’t just intellectual dissent, it’s a form of social deviance.

The line also carries a sly warning to writers and politicians alike. If meaning can be reverse-engineered by repetition, then rhetoric can outrun evidence. Wells, a futurist with a skeptic’s streak, is pointing at the machinery beneath “common sense” and reminding you it’s often just common recitation.