Edward Bellamy - Looking Backward (1888)

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

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

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

Edward Bellamy
If 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.

Edward Bellamy
Is a man satisfied, merely because he is perfumed himself, to mingle with a malodorous crowd?

Edward Bellamy
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.

Edward Bellamy
Human history, like all great movements, was cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning. the idea of indefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the imagination, with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a better illustration of the career of humanity. Tending upward and sunward from the aphelion of barbarism, the race attained the perihelion of civilization only to plunge downward once more to its nether goal in the regions of chaos.

Edward Bellamy
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.

Edward Bellamy
Competition, which is the instinct of selfishness, is another word for dissipation of energy, while combination is the secret of efficient production.

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

Edward Bellamy
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.

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

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

Edward Bellamy
When you come to analyze the love of money which was the general impulse to effort in your day, you find that the dread of want and desire of luxury was but one of several motives which the pursuit of money represented; the others, and with many the more influential, being desire of power, of social position, and reputation for ability and success.

Edward Bellamy
On no other stage are the scenes shifted with a swiftness so like magic as on the great stage of history when once the hour strikes.

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

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

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

Edward Bellamy