Looking Backward: 2000–1887 Quotes

“Edward Bellamy’s great utopian work, Looking Backward.”

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

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

“when Eugene Debs read Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, it deeply affected him.”

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

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

“Manual labor meant association with a rude, coarse, and ignorant class of people. There is no such class now.”

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

“Wikipedia: Looking Backward: 2000–1887”

“ Looking Backward, 2000-1887'' (1888) Full text online at Gutenberg”

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

“The greater efficiency which education gives to all sorts of labor, except the rudest, makes up in a short period for the time lost in acquiring it.”

“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.”

“A hugely influential, rather bureaucratic egalitarian/naïve communist utopia. Deals very well with the confusion of the “modern” (19th Century) protagonist in a world he hasn’t helped create.”

“Presently, too, as I observed the wretched beings about me more closely, I perceived that they were all quite dead. Their bodies were so many living sepulchres. On each brutal brow was plainly written the hic jacet of a soul dead within.”

“No single thing is so important to every man as to have for neighbors intelligent, companionable persons. There is nothing, therefore, which the nation can do for him that will enhance so much his own happiness as to educate his neighbors.”

“The folly of men, not their hard-heartedness, was the great cause of the world's poverty. It was not the crime of man, nor of any class of men, that made the race so miserable, but a hideous, ghastly mistake, a colossal world-darkening blunder.”

“...the barbaric industrial and social system, which has come down to us from savage antiquity, undermined by the modern humane spirit, riddled by the criticism of economic science, is shaking the world with convulsions that presage its collapse.”

“I know that the world now is heaven compared with what it was in your day, that the only feeling you will have after a little while will be one of thankfulness to God that your life in that age was so strangely cut off, to be returned to you in this."”

“What a paradise for womankind the world must be now!.... In my day, even wealth and unlimited servants did not enfranchise their possessors from household cares, while the women of the merely well-to-do and poorer classes lived and died martyrs to them."”