25 quotes
The nation guarantees the nurture, education, and comfortable maintenance of every citizen from the cradle to the grave.
Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888)
If bread is the first necessity of life, recreation is a close second.
Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888)
An American credit card is just as good in Europe as American gold used to be.
Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888)
Manual labor meant association with a rude, coarse, and ignorant class of people. There is no such class now.
Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888)
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.
Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888)
Buying and selling is essentially antisocial.
Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888)
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.
Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888)
Badly off as the men, too, were in your day, they were more fortunate than their mothers and wives.
Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888)
The equal wealth and equal opportunities of culture which all persons now enjoy have simply made us all members of one class.
Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888)
Your system was liable to periodical convulsions...business crises at intervals of five to ten years, which wrecked the industries of the nation.
Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888)
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.
Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888)
Looking Backward was written in the belief that the Golden Age lies before us and not behind us.
Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888)
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?
Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888)
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.
Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888)
It was no doubt the common opinion of thoughtful men that society was approaching a critical period which might result in great changes. The labor troubles, their causes, course, and cure, took lead of all other topics in the public prints, and in serious conversation.
Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888)
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 this consequence of a partial enjoyment of education!
Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888)
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 principle which makes all operations on a large scale proportionally cheaper than on a small scale holds as to education also.
Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888)
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. And then I showed them how four fifths of the labor of men was utterly wasted by the mutual warfare, the lack of organization and concert among the workers.
Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888)
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 have been the actual if mind and soul had lived.
Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888)
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 felicity already attained, and ceased to strive for further improvements.
Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888)