Edward Bellamy Quotes & Sayings

[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. — Edward Bellamy

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

Why, when the world gets to understand about it I expect that two men or two women, or a man and a woman, will come in here, and say to me, 'We have quarrelled and outraged each other, we have injured our friend, our wife, our husband; we regret, we would forgive, but we cannot, because we remember. Put between us the atonement of forgetfulness, that we may love each other as of old. — Edward Bellamy

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

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

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. — Edward Bellamy

The effect of change in surroundings is like that of lapse of time in making the past seem remote. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 — Edward Bellamy

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

Buying and selling is essentially antisocial. — Edward Bellamy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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