Looking Backward: 2000–1887

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

— Looking Backward: 2000–1887

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.

— Looking Backward: 2000–1887

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

— Looking Backward: 2000–1887

[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.

— Looking Backward: 2000–1887

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

— Looking Backward: 2000–1887

Equal wealth and equal opportunities of culture... have simply made us all members of one class.

— Looking Backward: 2000–1887

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

— Looking Backward: 2000–1887

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

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 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.

— Looking Backward: 2000–1887

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

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