Edward Bellamy

Even the worker of special ability, who might hope to gain most by it, could not hope to gain so much as he would lose in common with others by sacrificing the increased efficiency of the industrial machinery that would result from the …

The theory that a person has a right in dealing with his fellows to take advantage of his superior abilities is nothing other than a slightly more roundabout expression of the doctrine that might is right.

Put workingmen in the places of the capitalists and they would have done just as the capitalists were doing. In fact, whenever workingmen did become capitalists they were commonly said to make the hardest sort of masters.

It was not till the kings had been shorn of power and the interregnum of sham democracy had set in, leaving no virile force in the state or the world to resist the money power, that the opportunity for a world-wide plutocratic despotism …

Power over others is necessarily demoralizing to the master and degrading to the subject.

Government is actually now what it nominally was in the America of your day--the servant, tool, and instrument by which the people give effect to their will, itself being without will.

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

On no other stage are the scenes shifted with a swiftness so like magic as on the great stage of history when once the hour strikes.

As I looked, horror struck, from one death's head to another, I was affected by a singular hallucination. Like a wavering translucent spirit face superimposed upon each of these brutish masks I saw the ideal, the possible face that would …

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 …

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

To educate some to the highest degree, and leave the mass wholly uncultivated, as you did, made the gap between them almost like that between different natural species, which have no means of communication. What could be more inhuman than …

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.

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

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.

If it took half the revenue of the nation, nobody would grudge it, nor even if it took it all save a bare pittance. But in truth the expense of educating ten thousand youth is not ten nor five times that of educating one thousand. The …

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

The equal wealth and equal opportunities of culture which all persons now enjoy have simply made us all members of one class.

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

If 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 …

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

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 …

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

Buying and selling is essentially antisocial.