Looking Backward quotes

I first saw the light in the city of Boston in the year 1857.

“What!” you say, “eighteen fifty-seven? That is an odd slip. He means nineteen fifty-seven, of course.” I beg pardon, but there is no mistake.

This, however, was not the fact. The sum had been originally by no means large. It was, in fact, much larger now that three generations had been supported upon it in idleness, than it was at first.

This mystery of use without consumption, of warmth without combustion, seems like magic, but was merely an ingenious application of the art now happily lost but carried to great perfection by your ancestors, of shifting the burden of one’s support on the shoulders of others.

The man who had accomplished this, and it was the end all sought, was said to live on the income of his investments. To explain at this point how the ancient methods of industry made this possible would delay us too much.

… the relations of the rich and poor to one another, perhaps I cannot do better than to compare society as it then was to a prodigious coach which the masses of humanity were harnessed to and dragged toilsomely along a very hilly and sandy road.

The driver was hunger, and permitted no lagging, though the pace was necessarily very slow.

Despite the difficulty of drawing the coach at all along so hard a road, the top was covered with passengers who never got down, even at the steepest ascents. These seats on top were very breezy and comfortable.

They had the votes and the power to do so if they pleased, and their leaders meant they should. Some of these desponding observers went so far as to predict an impending social cataclysm.

Humanity, they argued, having climbed to the top round of the ladder of civilization, was about to take a header into chaos, after which it would doubtless pick itself up, turn round, and begin to climb again.

Repeated experiences of this sort in historic and prehistoric times possibly accounted for the puzzling bumps on the human cranium. Human history, like all great movements, was cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning.

I had to admit that, if I were indeed the victim of a practical joke, its authors had chosen an admirable agent for carrying out their imposition.

The impressive and even eloquent manner of this man would have lent dignity to an argument that the moon was made of cheese.

The smile with which I had regarded him as he advanced his trance hypothesis did not appear to confuse him in the slightest degree.

Raising my eyes at last towards the horizon, I looked westward. That blue ribbon winding away to the sunset, was it not the sinuous Charles? I looked east; Boston harbor stretched before me within its headlands, not one of its green islets missing.

I knew then that I had been told the truth concerning the prodigious thing which had befallen me.

I think it must have been many seconds that I sat up thus in bed staring about, without being able to regain the clue to my personal identity.

I was no more able to distinguish myself from pure being during those moments than we may suppose a soul in the rough to be before it has received the earmarks, the individualizing touches which make it a person.

Strange that the sense of this inability should be such anguish! but so we are constituted. There are no words for the mental torture I endured during this helpless, eyeless groping for myself in a boundless void.

How is the amount of the credit given respectively to the workers in different lines determined? By what title does the individual claim his particular share? What is the basis of allotment?”

“His title,” replied Dr. Leete, “is his humanity. The basis of his claim is the fact that he is a man.”

“The fact that he is a man!” I repeated, incredulously. “Do you possibly mean that all have the same share?”

In the nineteenth century, when a horse pulled a heavier load than a goat, I suppose you rewarded him. Now, we should have whipped him soundly if he had not, on the ground that, being much stronger, he ought to.

It is singular how ethical standards change.

” The doctor said this with such a twinkle in his eye that I was obliged to laugh.

“Nothing at all. It is not necessary that he should know or profess to know anything about them. Courtesy and accuracy in taking orders are all that are required of him.”

“What a prodigious amount of lying that simple arrangement saves!” I ejaculated.

“Do you mean that all the clerks misrepresented their goods in your day?” Edith asked.

So, now, the requirement of industrial service from those able to render it does not operate to deprive of the privileges of citizenship, which now implies the citizen’s maintenance, him who cannot work.

The worker is not a citizen because he works, but works because he is a citizen.

As you recognize the duty of the strong to fight for the weak, we, now that fighting is gone by, recognize his duty to work for him.

… it is, as I told you this morning, that the title of every man, woman, and child to the means of existence rests on no basis less plain, broad, and simple than the fact that they are fellows of one race—members of one human family.

The only coin current is the image of God, and that is good for all we have.

“I think there is no feature of the civilization of your epoch so repugnant to modern ideas as the neglect with which you treated your dependent classes.

For, by the same discrimination by which the father profited, the son, for whom he would give his life, being perchance weaker than others, might be reduced to crusts and beggary.

How men dared leave children behind them, I have never been able to understand.

”

All this merely shows, my dear fellow, how much easier it is to do things the right way than the wrong.

It is easier for a general up in a balloon, with perfect survey of the field, to maneuver a million men to victory than for a sergeant to manage a platoon in a thicket.

”

… have risen from the ranks, by tests so various and severe, to their positions, is proof in itself of extraordinary qualities, while as to faithfulness, our social system leaves them absolutely without any other motive than that of winning the esteem of their fellow citizens.

Corruption is impossible in a society where there is neither poverty to be bribed nor wealth to bribe

, while as to demagoguery or intrigue for office, the conditions of promotion render them out of the question.”

As eager boys in your day anticipated twenty-one, so men nowadays look forward to forty-five.

At twenty-one we become men, but at forty-five we renew youth.

Middle age and what you would have called old age are considered, rather than youth, the enviable time of life.

It is a strange reflection that at forty-five, when we are just entering upon the most enjoyable period of life, you already began to think of growing old and to look backward.

With you it was the forenoon, with us it is the afternoon, which is the brighter half of life.

”

There is neither private property, beyond personal belongings, now, nor buying and selling, and therefore the occasion of nearly all the legislation formerly necessary has passed away.

Formerly, society was a pyramid poised on its apex.

All the gravitations of human nature were constantly tending to topple it over, and it could be maintained upright, or rather upwrong (if you will pardon the feeble witticism), by an elaborate system of constantly renewed props and buttresses and guy-ropes in the form of …

A central Congress and forty state legislatures, turning out some twenty thousand laws a year, could not make new props fast enough to take the place of those which were constantly breaking down or becoming ineffectual through some shifting of the strain.

Now society rests on its base, and is in as little need of artificial supports as the everlasting hills.

”

Finally she whispered, “Had we not better go out now? You must not try yourself too far. Oh, how strange it must be to you!”

“On the contrary,” I replied, “it does not seem strange; that is the strangest part of it.”

“Even so,” I replied. “The emotions with which you evidently credit me, and which I anticipated would attend this visit, I simply do not feel. I realize all that these surroundings suggest, but without the agitation I expected.

… a phrase which was often used in your day, we should not consider life worth living if we had to be surrounded by a population of ignorant, boorish, coarse, wholly uncultivated men and women, as was the plight of the few educated in your day.

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

Could he take more than a very limited satisfaction, even in a palatial apartment, if the windows on all four sides opened into stable yards? And yet just that was the situation of those considered most fortunate as to culture and refinement in your day.

I know that the poor and ignorant envied the rich and cultured then; but to us the latter, living as they did, surrounded by squalor and brutishness, seem little better off than the former.

The cultured man in your age was like one up to the neck in a nauseous bog solacing himself with a smelling bottle.

You see, perhaps, now, how we look at this question of universal high education. No single thing is so important to every man as to have for neighbors intelligent, companionable persons.

The proportion of individuals capable of intellectual sympathies or refined intercourse, to the mass of their contemporaries, used to be so infinitesimal as to be in any broad view of humanity scarcely worth mentioning.

One generation of the world today represents a greater volume of intellectual life than any five centuries ever did before.

“There is still another point I should mention in stating the grounds on which nothing less than the universality of the best education could now be tolerated,” continued Dr. Leete, “and that is, the interest of the coming generation in having educated parents.

Already accustomed to accept money for commodities, the people next accepted promises for money, and ceased to look at all behind the representative for the thing represented.

Money was a sign of real commodities, but credit was but the sign of a sign.

There was a natural limit to gold and silver, that is, money proper, but none to credit, and the result was that the volume of credit, that is, the promises of money, ceased to bear any ascertainable proportion to the money, still less to the …

“It was the misfortune of your contemporaries that they had to cement their business fabric with a material which an accident might at any moment turn into an explosive.

They were in the plight of a man building a house with dynamite for mortar, for credit can be compared with nothing else.

“If you would see how needless were these convulsions of business which I have been speaking of, and how entirely they resulted from leaving industry to private and unorganized management, just consider the working of our system.

Nevertheless, that is just the verdict history has passed on them. Their system of unorganized and antagonistic industries was as absurd economically as it was morally abominable.

Selfishness was their only science, and in industrial production selfishness is suicide.

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

“I don’t know even that,” she replied, venturing a momentary glance at my face, furiously blushing, and yet with a quaint smile flickering about her lips which betrayed a certain perception of humor in the situation despite its embarrassment—“

I am not sure that it would even interest you.

”

Dr. Leete smiled. “Have no anxiety on that score, Mr. West,” he replied. “

The Creator took very good care that whatever other modifications the dispositions of men and women might with time take on, their attraction for each other should remain constant.

The mere fact that in an age like yours, when the struggle for existence must have left people little time for other thoughts, and the future was so uncertain that to assume parental responsibilities must have often seemed like a criminal risk, there was even …

Can you think of any service constituting a stronger claim on the nation’s gratitude than bearing and nursing the nation’s children? According to our view, none deserve so well of the world as good parents.

There is no task so unselfish, so necessarily without return, though the heart is well rewarded, as the nurture of the children who are to make the world for one another when we are gone.

”

Wealth and rank no longer divert attention from personal qualities. Gold no longer ‘gilds the straitened forehead of the fool.’ The gifts of person, mind, and disposition; beauty, wit, eloquence, kindness, generosity, geniality, courage, are sure of transmission to posterity.

Every generation is sifted through a little finer mesh than the last.

The attributes that human nature admires are preserved, those that repel it are left behind.

… of every sort which we have provided to develop industry, talent, genius, excellence of whatever kind, are comparable in their effect on our young men with the fact that our women sit aloft as judges of the race and reserve themselves to reward the winners.

Of all the whips, and spurs, and baits, and prizes, there is none like the thought of the radiant faces which the laggards will find averted.

“Celibates nowadays are almost invariably men who have failed to acquit themselves creditably in the work of life.

The past was dead, crushed beneath a century’s weight, and from the present I was shut out. There was no place for me anywhere.

I was neither dead nor properly alive.

“Forgive me for following you.”

For some moments she stood so, panting a little. Then blushing deeper than ever, but with a dazzling smile, she looked up.

“Are you sure it is not you who are blind?” she said.

That was all, but it was enough, for it told me that, unaccountable, incredible as it was, this radiant daughter of a golden age had bestowed upon me not alone her pity, but her love.

Were these human beings, who could behold the wretchedness of their fellows without so much as a change of countenance? And yet, all the while, I knew well that it was I who had changed, and not my contemporaries.

I had dreamed of a city whose people fared all alike as children of one family and were one another’s keepers in all things.

Another feature of the real Boston, which assumed the extraordinary effect of strangeness that marks familiar things seen in a new light, was the prevalence of advertising.

Whether the pathos or the moral repulsiveness of the spectacle most impressed me, so suddenly become a stranger in my own city, I know not.

Wretched men, I was moved to cry, who, because they will not learn to be helpers of one another, are doomed to be beggars of one another from the least to the greatest!

This horrible babel of shameless self-assertion and mutual depreciation, this stunning clamor of conflicting boasts, appeals, and adjurations, this stupendous system of brazen beggary, what was it all but the necessity of a society in which the opportunity to serve the world according to his …

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?

I had passed through Washington Street thousands of times before and viewed the ways of those who sold merchandise, but my curiosity concerning them was as if I had never gone by their way before.

The roar and rattle of wheels and hammers resounding from every side was not the hum of a peaceful industry, but the clangor of swords wielded by foemen.

These mills and shops were so many forts, each under its own flag, its guns trained on the mills and shops about it, and its sappers busy below, undermining them.

Within each one of these forts the strictest organization of industry was insisted on; the separate gangs worked under a single central authority. No interference and no duplicating of work were permitted. Each had his allotted task, and none were idle.

Alas for the poor old bank director with his poem! He had mistaken the throbbing of an abscess for the beating of the heart.

What he called “a wonderful piece of mechanism” was an imperfect device to remedy an unnecessary defect, the clumsy crutch of a self-made cripple.

After the banks had closed I wandered aimlessly about the business quarter for an hour or two, and later sat a while on one of the benches of the Common, finding an interest merely in watching the throngs that passed, such as one has in …

Alas for the poor old bank director with his poem!

He had mistaken the throbbing of an abscess for the beating of the heart.

What he called “a wonderful piece of mechanism” was an imperfect device to remedy an unnecessary defect, the clumsy crutch of a self-made cripple.

Seeing this so plainly, could they fail to compare the scientific manner in which the nation went to war with the unscientific manner in which it went to work?

Would they not query since what time the killing of men had been a task so much more important than feeding and clothing them, that a trained army should be deemed alone adequate to the former, while the latter was left to a mob?

It was now toward nightfall, and the streets were thronged with the workers from the stores, the shops, and mills.