Edward Bellamy quotes

Edward Bellamy was an American author and journalist, most famous for his utopian novel "Looking Backward." His visionary work imagined a future society based on equality and social reform. He inspired numerous political and social movements advocating for economic fairness and cooperation. Here are 72 of his quotes:

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

Edward Bellamy

Buying and selling is essentially antisocial.

Edward Bellamy

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

Edward Bellamy

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

Edward Bellamy

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

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

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

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

[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

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 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

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

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

Edward Bellamy

Our economic system puts us in a position where we can follow Christ's maxim, so impossible for you, to 'take no thought for the morrow.'

Edward Bellamy

The difference between the past and present selves of the same individual is so great as to make them different persons for all moral purposes. That single fact we were just speaking of-the fact that no man would care for vengeance on one who had injured him, provided he knew that all memory of the offence had been blotted utterly from his enemy's mind-proves the entire proposition. It shows that it is not the present self of his enemy that the avenger is angry with at all, but the past self. Even in the blindness of his wrath he intuitively recognizes the distinction between the two.

Edward Bellamy

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

Edward Bellamy

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

Edward Bellamy

Forgiving sins, I should have known, is not blotting them out. The blood of Christ only turns them red instead of black. It leaves them in the record. It leaves them in the memory.

Edward Bellamy

Do you not know that close to your doors a great multitude of men and women, flesh of your flesh, live lives that are one agony from birth to death? Listen! their dwellings are so near that if you hush your laughter you will hear their grievous voices, the piteous crying of the little ones that suckle poverty, the hoarse curses of men sodden in misery turned half-way back to brutes, the chaffering of an army of women selling themselves for bread. With what have you stopped your ears that you do not hear these doleful sounds?

Edward Bellamy

I was moved with contrition as with a strong agony, for I had been one of those who had endured that these things should be. Therefore now I found upon my garments the blood of this great multitude of strangled souls of my brothers. The voice of their blood cried out against me from the ground. Every stone of the reeking pavements, every brick of the pestilential rookeries, found a tongue and called after me as I fled: What hast thou done with thy brother Abel?

Edward Bellamy

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.

Edward Bellamy

Could they be reasoning beings, who did not see the folly which, when the product is made and ready for use, wastes so much of it in getting it to the user? If people eat with a spoon that leaks half its contents between bowl and lip, are they not likely to go hungry?

Edward Bellamy