# Quote — Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward

> It was agreed that affairs were going from bad to worse very fast, and that there was no telling what we should come to soon. The worst of it... is that the working classes all over the world seem to be going crazy at once. In Europe it is far worse even than here. I'm sure I should not dare to live there at all. I asked Mr. Bartlett the other day where we should emigrate to if all the terrible things took place which those socialists threaten. He said he did not know any place now where society could be called stable except Greenland, Patagonia, and the Chinese Empire." "Those Chinamen knew what they were about," somebody added, "when they refused to let in our western civilization. They knew what it would lead to better than we did. They saw it was nothing but dynamite in disguise."

- Author: [Edward Bellamy](https://www.leafyquotes.com/edward-bellamy.md)
- Book: [Looking Backward](https://www.leafyquotes.com/edward-bellamy/looking-backward.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Looking_Backward:_2000%E2%80%931887#Quotes) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/edward-bellamy/looking-backward/it-was-agreed

## More from this book

> The actual expense of your colleges appears to have been very low, and would have been far lower if their patronage had been greater. The higher education nowadays is as cheap as the lower, as all grades of teachers, like all other workers, receive the same support. We have simply added to the common school system of compulsory education, in vogue in Massachusetts a hundred years ago, a half dozen higher grades, carrying the youth to the age of twenty-one and giving him what you used to call the education of a gentleman, instead of turning him loose at fourteen or fifteen with no mental equipment beyond reading, writing, and the multiplication table.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/edward-bellamy/looking-backward/the-actual-expense.md)

> 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.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/edward-bellamy/looking-backward/the-greater-efficiency.md)

> Presently, too, as I observed the wretched beings about me more closely, I perceived that they were all quite dead. Their bodies were so many living sepulchres. On each brutal brow was plainly written the hic jacet of a soul dead within.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/edward-bellamy/looking-backward/presently-too-as-i-observed.md)