Wit & Attitude Quote by H.G. Wells

Wells lands the punch by sounding like a moralist and then swerving into blasphemy with the calm assurance of a man who’s done the math. “Sailors ought never to go to church” sets up an expected Victorian lecture about discipline, piety, and respectability. Then he snaps the frame: if you’re going to talk about sailors honestly, don’t pretend the institution built for tidy, landlocked consciences is their natural home. Send them to hell, he says, because at least hell matches the weather.

The joke isn’t just irreverence; it’s a critique of how polite society allocates virtue. Sailors in late-19th- and early-20th-century Britain carried the empire on their backs and were still treated as coarse, morally suspect labor when they came ashore. Wells flips that hypocrisy into a one-liner: church is “uncomfortable” not because faith is hard, but because the church (as a social space) is built to shame the wrong people. Hell, by contrast, is imagined as more honest, more hospitable, even more democratic: no pretense, no lace curtains, no condescension.

Wells’s broader project often involves puncturing complacent institutions with science-fictional or satirical pressure. Here he does it with class humor and a sly empathy. He’s not damning sailors so much as mocking the idea that respectability equals goodness, or that moral language belongs to those who never had to live dangerously. The line works because it treats “comfort” as the real currency of belonging: who gets to feel at home in the nation’s moral house, and who is told they should burn elsewhere.