Edward Bellamy
Edward Bellamy
Edward Bellamywas an American author and socialist, most famous for his utopian novel, Looking Backward, a tale set in the distant future of the year 2000. Bellamy's vision of a harmonious future world inspired the formation of at least 165 "Nationalist Clubs" dedicated to the propagation of Bellamy's political ideas and working to make them a practical reality...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth26 March 1850
CityChicopee, MA
CountryUnited States of America
Edward Bellamy quotes about
The primal principle of democracy is the worth and dignity of the individual.
If bread is the first necessity of life, recreation is a close second.
Competition, which is the instinct of selfishness, is another word for dissipation of energy, while combination is the secret of efficient production.
Equal wealth and equal opportunities of culture...have simply made us all members of one class.
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.
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.
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
I first saw the light in the city of Boston in the year 1857.
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.
Your system was liable to periodical convulsions...business crises at intervals of five to ten years, which wrecked the industries of the nation.
[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.
The nation guarantees the nurture, education, and comfortable maintenance of every citizen from the cradle to the grave.
Buying and selling is essentially antisocial.
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.