Mark’s Reviews > The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose > Status Update

The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.

The public has always, and in every age, been badly brought up.

All unintellectual labor, all monotonous, dull labor, all labor the deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the Stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing.

One man owns a machine which does the work of 500 men. 500 men are in consequence thrown out of employment and having no work to do become hungry and take to thieving. The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it and has 500 times as much as he should have and probably more than he really wants. Were that machine the property of all everyone would benefit by it.

When each member of the community has sufficient for his wants, and is not interfered with by his neighbor, it will not be an object of any interest to him to interfere with anyone else.

All modes of government are failures. All authority is degrading and demoralizing.
Punishment causes crime. When there is no punishment at all, crime will either cease to exist, or if it occurs, will be treated by physicians as a very distressing form of dementia, to be cured by care and kindness.

Horrid, unwholesome dwellings
Extremes of luxury and pauperism
Ordinary riches can be stolen from a man. Real riches cannot.

What I mean by a perfect man is one who develops under perfect condition; one who is not wounded, or worried, or named, or in danger.
Most personalities have been obliged to be rebels. Half their strength has been wasted in friction (Byron).

Realizing the perfection of what is in yourself to your own incomparable gain and to the incomparable and lasting gain of the whole world.
Charity is bullshit
The refinement of pleasures or joy of life.
The man who is poor is in himself absolutely of no importance.
Realizing some form of beautiful and intellectual life.
Abolition of private property

Reconstructing society such that poverty is impossible