Edward Bellamy > Quotes

“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 yet 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, Looking Backward

“And in heaven's name, who are the public enemies?" exclaimed Dr. Leete. "Are they France, England Germany or hunger, cold and nakedness?”
― Edward Bellamy

“Is a man satisfied, merely because he is perfumed himself, to mingle with a malodorous crowd?”
― Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward

“There is no such thing in a civilized society as self-support. In a state of society so barbarous as not even to know family cooperation, each individual may possibly support himself, though even then for a part of his life only; but from the moment that men begin to live together, and constitute even the rudest of society, self-support becomes impossible. As men grow more civilized, and the subdivision of occupations and services is carried out, a complex mutual dependence becomes the universal rule. Every man, however solitary may seem his occupation, is a member of a vast industrial partnership, as large as the nation, as large as humanity. The necessity of mutual dependence should imply the duty and guarantee of mutual support...”
― Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward

“If bread is the first necessity of life, recreation is a close second.”
― Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887

“Caligula wished that the Roman people had but one neck that he might cut it off, and as I read this letter I am afraid that for a moment I was capable of wishing the same thing concerning the laboring class of America.”
― Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward

“The folly of men not their hard heartedness was the great cause of the world s poverty.”
― Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887

“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, Looking Backward, 2000-1887

“The effect of change in surroundings is like that of lapse of time in making the past seem remote.”
― Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887

“Nothing could be simpler,” was Dr. Leete’s reply. “We require of each that he shall make the same effort; that is, we demand of him the best service it is in his power to give.” “And supposing all do the best they can,” I answered, “the amount of the product resulting is twice greater from one man than from another.” “Very true,” replied Dr. Leete; “but the amount of the resulting product has nothing whatever to do with the question, which is one of desert. Desert is a moral question, and the amount of the product a material quantity. It would be an extraordinary sort of logic which should try to determine a moral question by a material standard. The amount of the effort alone is pertinent to the question of desert. All men who do their best, do the same.”
― Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward 2000-1887

“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, Looking Backward: 2000-1887

“This mystery of use without consumption, of warmth without combustion, seems like magic, but was merely an ingenious application of the art now happily lost but carried to great perfection by your ancestors, of shifting the burden of one's support on the shoulders of others.”
― Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887

“They were not serving the public interest, but their immediate personal interest, and it was nothing to them what the ultimate effect of their course on the general prosperity might be, if but they increased their own hoard, for these goods were their own, and the more they sold and the more they got for them, the greater their gain. The more wasteful the people were, the more articles they did not want which they could be induced to buy, the better for these sellers.”
― Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887

“Who is capable of self-support?” he demanded. “There is no such thing in a civilized society as self-support. In a state of society so barbarous as not even to know family cooperation, each individual may possibly support himself, though even then for a part of his life only; but from the moment that men begin to live together, and constitute even the rudest sort of society, self-support becomes”
― Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward

“Men laid aside the social traditions and practices of barbarians, and assumed a social order worthy of rational and human beings. Ceasing to be predatory in their habits, they became co-workers, and found in fraternity, at once, the science of wealth and happiness. "What shall I eat and drink, and wherewithal shall I be clothed?" stated as a problem beginning and ending in self, had been an anxious and an endless one. But when once it was conceived, not from the individual but the fraternal standpoint, "What shall we eat and drink, and wherewithal shall we be clothed" -- its difficulties vanished.”
― Edward Bellamy

“When I saw that things which were to me so intolerable moved them not at all, that words that melted my heart to speak had only offended them with the speaker, I was at first stunned and then overcome with a desperate sickness and faintness at the heart”
― Edward Bellamy

“I had not been stranded upon the shore of this strange world to find myself alone and companionless.”
― Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887

“Wretched men, I was moved to cry, who, because they will not learn to be helpers of one another, are doomed to be beggars of one another from the least to the greatest!”
― Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887

“By way of attempting to give the reader some general impression of the way people lived together in those days, and especially of the relations of the rich and poor to one another, perhaps I cannot do better than to compare society as it then was to a prodigious coach which the masses of humanity were harnessed to and dragged toilsomely along a very hilly and sandy road. The driver was hunger, and permitted no lagging, though the pace was necessarily very slow. Despite the difficulty of drawing the coach at all along so hard a road, the top was covered with passengers who never got down, even at the steepest ascents. These seats on top were very breezy and comfortable. Well up out of the dust, their occupants could enjoy the scenery at their leisure, or critically discuss the merits of the straining team.”
― Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward 2000-1887

“Moreover, the excessive individualism which then prevailed was inconsistent with much public spirit. What little wealth you had seems almost wholly to have been lavished in private luxury. Nowadays, on the contrary, there is no destination of the surplus wealth so popular as the adornment of the city, which all enjoy in equal degree.”
― Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward

“The private umbrella is father's favorite figure to illustrate the old way when everybody lived for himself and his family. There is a nineteenth century painting at the Art Gallery representing a crowd of people in the rain, each one holding his umbrella over himself and his wife, and giving his neighbors the drippings, which he claims must have been meant by the artist as a satire on his times.”
― Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: Illustrated

“In my day," I replied, "it was considered that the proper functions of government, strictly speaking, were limited to keeping the peace and defending the people against the public enemy, that is, to the military and police powers." "And, in heaven's name, who are the public enemies?" exclaimed Dr. Leete. "Are they France, England, Germany, or hunger, cold, and nakedness?”
― Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward

“As for the comparatively small class of violent crimes against persons, unconnected with any idea of gain, they were almost wholly confined, even in your day, to the ignorant and bestial; and in these days, when education and good manners are not the monopoly of a few, but universal, such atrocities are scarcely ever heard of.”
― Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887

“If we could have devised an arrangement for providing everyone 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, Looking Backward

“The readiness with which men accustom themselves, as matters of course, to improvements in their condition, which, when anticipated, seemed to leave nothing more to be desired, could not be more strikingly illustrated. What reflection could be better calculated to moderate the enthusiasm of reformers who count for their reward on the lively gratitude of future ages!”
― Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward 2000-1887

“If I were to give you, in one sentence, a key to what may seem the mysteries of our civilization as compared with that of your age, I should say that it is the fact that the solidarity of the race and the brotherhood of man, which to you were but fine phrases, are, to our thinking and feeling, ties as real and as vital as physical fraternity.”
― Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887

“Cada uno, sin dejar de andar, se volvía para escuchar el fantasma de la incertidumbre, que murmuraba a su oído: - Trabaja cuanto puedas, amigo mío; levántate temprano y no descanses hasta bien entrada la noche, robes con habilidad o sirvas fielmente, jamás llegarás a conocer la seguridad! Rico hoy, mañana puedes volver a ser poblre. En vano dejarás millones a tus hijos, jamás podrás estar seguro de que tu hijo no llegará a ser el criado de tu criado, o que tu hija no tenga que venderse por un trozo de pan -”
― Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887

“Human nature itself must have changed very much," I said. "Not at all," was Dr. Leete's reply, "but the conditions of human life have changed, and with them the motives of human action.”
― Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887

“Una de las mejores razones, si no hubiera otra, para la abolición del dinero, es precisamente que su posesión no implicaba un título legítimo en el poseedor. El dinero tenía el mismo valor en las manos del ladrón o del asesino que en las del hombre que lo había obtenido por el trabajo. Según nuestras ideas, el hecho de comprar y de vender es antisocial en todas sus tendencias. Es una educación en el egoísmo a expensas del vecino, y ninguna sociedad educada en estos principios podrá jamás elevarse por encima de un grado muy inferior de civilización.”
― Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887

“Their misery came, with all your other miseries, from that incapacity for cooperation which followed from the individualism on which your social system was founded, from your inability to perceive that you could make ten times more profit out of your fellow men by uniting with them than by contending with them.”
― Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887