Edward Bellamy
Edward Bellamy was an acclaimed American author and Christian socialist.
His novel Looking Backward is a widely regarded work of socialist Utopian fiction and was referenced in many Marxist publications of the time.
When it was first published in 1888, its success was behind that of only Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ.
It inspired a less successful sequel entitled Equality that was more of a political tract than a novel and generally spurred socialist movement both in the United States and abroad. At one point, there was even a Bellamy Party in the Netherlands.
“I cannot sufficiently celebrate the glorious liberty that reigns in the public libraries of the twentieth century as compared with the intolerable management of those of the nineteenth century, in which the books were jealously railed away from the people, and obtainable only at an expenditure of time and red tape calculated to discourage any ordinary taste for literature.”
Edward Bellamy
“With a tear for the dark past, turn we then to the dazzling future, and, veiling our eyes, press forward. The long and weary winter of the race is ended. Its summer has begun. Humanity has burst the chrysalis. The heavens are before it.”
Edward Bellamy
“And in heaven's name, who are the public enemies?" exclaimed Dr. Leete. "Are they France, England Germany or hunger, cold and nakedness?”
Edward Bellamy
“The folly of men not their hard heartedness was the great cause of the world s poverty.”
Edward Bellamy
“If bread is the first necessity of life, recreation is a close second.”
Edward Bellamy
“Is a man satisfied, merely because he is perfumed himself, to mingle with a malodorous crowd?”
Edward Bellamy
“Caligula wished that the Roman people had but one neck that he might cut it off, and as I read this letter I am afraid that for a moment I was capable of wishing the same thing concerning the laboring class of America.”
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 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.”
Edward Bellamy
“There is no such thing in a civilized society as self-support. In a state of society so barbarous as not even to know family cooperation, each individual may possibly support himself, though even then for a part of his life only; but from the moment that men begin to live together, and constitute even the rudest of society, self-support becomes impossible. As men grow more civilized, and the subdivision of occupations and services is carried out, a complex mutual dependence becomes the universal rule. Every man, however solitary may seem his occupation, is a member of a vast industrial partnership, as large as the nation, as large as humanity. The necessity of mutual dependence should imply the duty and guarantee of mutual support...”
Edward Bellamy