Time & Perspective Quote by Lincoln Steffens

A travel postcard from tomorrow, delivered with the dry wink of a reporter who knows how headlines seduce. When Lincoln Steffens says, "I have been over into the future, and it works", he’s not offering a starry-eyed prophecy so much as a provocation: the future is not an abstract hope, it’s a system you can visit, test, and come back from with receipts. The line’s sly power is that it borrows the authority of eyewitness journalism for something Americans usually treat as faith.

Context sharpens the edge. Steffens was a muckraker who made a career out of exposing how American institutions failed in plain sight. So when he famously returned from the early Soviet experiment and praised its forward motion (a remark later treated as naive, sometimes disowned or qualified), the quote lands as both reportage and rhetorical weapon. It’s designed to shame complacency: if a battered, revolutionary state can make a new order function at all, what excuse does a wealthy democracy have for tolerating corruption and inequality?

The subtext is also about impatience with liberal gradualism. "It works" is blunt, almost industrial language, a mechanic’s verdict rather than a philosopher’s. Steffens frames politics like engineering: judge outcomes, not intentions. That’s why the sentence has endured beyond its original target. It captures the perennial temptation of modernity: to treat authoritarian efficiency as proof of moral progress, and to confuse movement with justice. The brilliance - and danger - is in the understatement.