Edward Bellamy Quotes

Competition, which is the instinct of selfishness, is another word for dissipation of energy, while combination is the secret of efficient production.

No republic can long exist unless a substantial equality in the wealth of citizens prevails.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Is a man satisfied, merely because he is perfumed himself, to mingle with a malodorous crowd?

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.

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

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.