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  "title": "Looking Backward",
  "slug": "looking-backward",
  "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/edward-bellamy/looking-backward",
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  "author": {
    "name": "Edward Bellamy",
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      "slug": "the-greater-efficiency",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/edward-bellamy/looking-backward/the-greater-efficiency",
      "text": "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.",
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      "slug": "all-thoughtful-men",
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      "text": "All thoughtful men agree that the present aspect of society is portentous of great changes. The only question is, whether they will be for the better or the worse. Those who believe in man's essential nobleness lean to the former view, those who believe in his essential baseness to the latter. For my part, I hold to the former opinion. Looking Backward was written in the belief that the Golden Age lies before us and not behind us, and is not far away. Our children will surely see it, and we, too, who are already men and women, if we deserve it by our faith and by our works.",
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          "name": "human nature",
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      "slug": "the-folly-of-men",
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      "text": "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.",
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          "name": "stupidity",
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      "slug": "their-system-of-unorganized",
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      "text": "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; and not till the idea of increasing the individual hoard gives place to the idea of increasing the common stock can industrial combination be realized, and the acquisition of wealth really begin. Even if the principle of share and share alike for all men were not the only humane and rational basis for a society, we should still enforce it as economically expedient, seeing that until the disintegrating influence of self-seeking is suppressed no true concert of industry is possible.'",
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      "topics": [
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          "name": "selfishness",
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    {
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      "slug": "no-single-thing",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/edward-bellamy/looking-backward/no-single-thing",
      "text": "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.",
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      "topics": [
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          "name": "happiness",
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        {
          "name": "education",
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      "id": "23633d08-a48e-4c4c-9221-8e260ce93c9c",
      "slug": "do-you-not",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/edward-bellamy/looking-backward/do-you-not",
      "text": "Do you not know that close to your doors a great multitude of men and women, flesh of your flesh, live lives that are one agony from birth to death? Listen! their dwellings are so near that if you hush your laughter you will hear their grievous voices, the piteous crying of the little ones that suckle poverty, the hoarse curses of men sodden in misery turned half-way back to brutes, the chaffering of an army of women selling themselves for bread. With what have you stopped your ears that you do not hear these doleful sounds?",
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      "slug": "if-bread-is-the",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/edward-bellamy/looking-backward/if-bread-is-the",
      "text": "If bread is the first necessity of life, recreation is a close second.",
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      "id": "73577865-2e6c-4b4b-ab04-fbbf5cf0d082",
      "slug": "hold-the-period",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/edward-bellamy/looking-backward/hold-the-period",
      "text": "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.",
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      "slug": "equal-wealth-and",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/edward-bellamy/looking-backward/equal-wealth-and",
      "text": "Equal wealth and equal opportunities of culture... have simply made us all members of one class.",
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      "slug": "when-you-come",
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      "text": "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.",
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      "slug": "in-your-day",
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      "text": "In your day fully nineteen twentieths of the crime, using the word broadly to include all sorts of misdemeanors, resulted from the inequality in the possessions of individuals; want tempted the poor, lust of greater gains, or the desire to preserve former gains, tempted the well-to-do. Directly or indirectly, the desire for money, which then meant every good thing, was the motive of all this crime, the taproot of a vast poison growth, which the machinery of law, courts, and police could barely prevent from choking your civilization outright.",
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      "text": "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.",
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