EDWARD BELLAMY

The primal principle of democracy is the worth and dignity of the individual.

I first saw the light in the city of Boston in the year 1857.

If bread is the first necessity of life, recreation is a close second.

[Industrialists] maim and slaughter workers by thousands.

It suggests the red flag with all manner of sexual novelties, and an abusive tone about God and religion.

Most of the purposes for which governments formerly existed no longer remain.

We have no parties or politicians, and as for demagoguery and corruption, they are words having only an historical significance…

Officials are under a constant temptation to misuse their power for the private profit of themselves or others.

Oppressive and intolerable as was the regime of the great consolidations of capital, even its victims, while they cursed it, were forced to admit the prodigious increase of efficiency which had been imparted to the national industries, the vast economies effected by concentration of management and unity of organization

The records of the period show that the outcry against the concentration of capital was furious. Men believed that it threatened society with a form of tyranny more abhorrent than it had ever endured.

A little capital or a new idea was enough to start a man in business for himself, workingmen were constantly becoming employers and there was no hard and fast line between the two classes. Labor unions were needless then

Hold the period of youth sacred to education, and the period of maturity, when the physical forces begin to flag, equally sacred to ease and agreeable relaxation.

The folly of men not their hard heartedness was the great cause of the world s poverty.

The most dangerous lovers women have are men of Cordis's feminine temperament. Such men, by the delicacy and sensitiveness of their own organizations, read women as easily and accurately as women read each other. They are alert to detect and interpret those smallest trifles in tone, expression, and bearing, which betray the real mood far more unmistakably than more obvious signs.

[I]f we could have devised an arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will, we should have considered the limit of human felicity already attained, and ceased to strive for further improvements.

Your system was liable to periodical convulsions, business crises at intervals of five to ten years, which wrecked the industries of the nation.

The nation guarantees the nurture, education, and comfortable maintenance of every citizen from the cradle to the grave.

An American credit card is just as good in Europe as American gold used to be.

Badly off as the men...were in your day, they were more fortunate than their mothers and wives.

People nowadays interchange gifts and favors out of friendship, but buying and selling is considered absolutely inconsistent with the mutual benevolence which should prevail between citizens and the sense of community of interest which supports our social system. According to our ideas, buying and selling is essentially anti-social in all its tendencies. It is an education in self-seeking at the expense of others, and no society whose citizens are trained in such a school can possibly rise above a very low grade of civilization

I cannot sufficiently celebrate the glorious liberty that reigns in the public libraries of the twentieth century as compared with the intolerable management of those of the nineteenth century, in which the books were jealously railed away from the people, and obtainable only at an expenditure of time and red tape calculated to discourage any ordinary taste for literature.

Equal wealth and equal opportunities of culture have simply made us all members of one class.

With a tear for the dark past, turn we then to the dazzling future, and, veiling our eyes, press forward. The long and weary winter of the race is ended. Its summer has begun. Humanity has burst the chrysalis. The heavens are before it.

Looking Backward was written in the belief that the Golden Age lies before us and not behind us.

No republic can long exist unless a substantial equality in the wealth of citizens prevails.