Quotes from Upton Sinclair

The American people thoroughly despise and hate their newspapers; yet they seem to have no idea what to do about it, and take it for granted that they must go on reading falsehoods for the balance of their days!

And you won't need any assurance that I agree with you about Hearst. He is one of the most unscrupulous and most dangerous men in America. He stops at nothing to get his way. And there are many like him.

In the south, you see, a lady takes for granted the slave-psychology in those she regards as her social inferiors. Not merely does she expect immediate obedience from all members of the colored race; she feels the same way about policemen in uniform--it would never occur to her to think of a policeman as anything but a servant, prepared to behave as such.

Most people had the impression that slavery had been abolished throughout the world some time ago, but when a king is also an oil magnate he can carry on a semi-secret slave trade across the Gulf of Aden, and his slaves are not automatically set free when they board an American war vessel.

What the American people do not realize is that officialdom today is big business. The higher men associate exclusively with the plush-lined set. Imagine any one of them putting his feet under the dinner table of a poor man!

The artist is by nature, one might say by definition, an anarchist. He lives in the freedom of his own imagination, and represents the experimental element of life. If "authority" should intervene and tell him what to think or to feel, the experiment would not be tried, the brain-child would be born dead.

Of course it was wrong that some should be born to privilege while others did not have enough to eat. Of course it was right that the disinherited should protest and try to change the ancient evils of the world. Who would not demand food when he was starving? Who would not fight for liberty when he was oppressed? Who could fail to hate cruelty and injustice, and cry out for it to be ended?

Yet there have been known to be philosophers and plain men who swore by Malthus in the books, and would, nevertheless, subscribe to a relief fund in time of a famine. It was the same with Jurgis, who consigned the unfit to destruction, while going about all day sick at heart because of his poor old father, who was wandering somewhere in the yards begging for a chance to earn his bread.

solemnly ordain: "There shall be no reprisals." That was the pattern of this new society, as Lanny came to know it; boundless cruelty combined with bland and pious lying. The Fascisti would develop falsehood into a new science and a new art; they would teach it to one dictator after another, until half the human race would no longer have any means of telling truth from falsehood.

That's exactly why the Cagoule was never purged in France; there were more than five hundred army officers involved in the plot, and the Cabinet voted against Léon Blum and Marx Dormoy, who wanted to root them out. The result was, they stayed in the army and went on making appeasement propaganda, even in the midst of war.

Love of children--ah, yes, all scandal-bureaus know what that means!

They would take advantage of an uprising to seize the reins themselves; they would turn upon their allies as they had done with Kerensky in Russia.

Eternal Spirit of the chainless Mind! Brightest in dungeons, Liberty! thou art: For there thy habitation is the heart— The heart which love of thee alone can bind; And when thy sons to fetters are consigned— To fetters, and the damp vault's dayless gloom, Their country conquers with their martyrdom, And Freedom's fame finds wings on every wind.

The propaganda of this bunch is anti-Jew, anti-Russian, and to some extent anti-British. It is closely tied up with the Catholic hierarchy—the Papal Knights and the Papal Delegates and our millionaires who back them." "There you have it! Franco Spain, and the intrigues of the Nazis in South America—these are all parts of the same world conspiracy!

What security could there be for any civilized person in any part of the world when bandits were permitted to seize the resources of nation after nation, to murder all the free-minded people and set all the wage-slaves to work producing mass destruction?

Generalissimo Franco was a soldier, a crusader for Christianity as he conceived it, but he was a poor administrator and no economist; his only conception of government was to kill all the people who did not agree with his ideas, or at least to shut them behind bars and feed them very badly. Carpenters and masons, steelworkers and miners, were dead or dying by the thousands, and did not contribute to the restoration of the shattered cities of Spain.

Lanny thought it was just as well that F.D.R. didn't have to undergo the ordeal of another interview with that hysterical Frenchman, who called himself a successor to Joan of Arc and whose mind had come straight out of that period of history.

They had the keenest realization of danger to the cause of freedom and social justice. They all wanted to do something; but first they had to agree what to do, and apparently they couldn't; they talked and argued until they were exhausted.

General de Gaulle, now head of the French government, had been invited to consult with the President; but instead the American Ambassador came on board and reported that le grand Charlie had made lame excuses. The truth was his dignité did not permit him to travel to see anybody. He hated Roosevelt almost as much as any Wall Street tycoon hated him

The two of them heartened each other, making bovine life a bit more tolerable.

In England where the radicals were allowed to gather in Hyde Park and say what they chose, crimes of political violence were practically unknown. On the other hand, in America, where it was customary for the police to arrest radicals and club and jail them, such crimes were common.

What he told them was to organize and defend their government to the last man and woman; to gather paving-stones and hurl them from the rooftops upon the Fascist invaders; to fight them with pikes, kitchen knives, and clubs with nails in; to take for their own the slogan of the French at Verdun:

so, then it must be that the thinkers will be forever subject to the men of brute force, and Plato's dream of a state ruled by philosophers will remain forever vain.

Montesquieu had said that to love reading was to exchange hours of boredom for hours of delight; Laharpe had said that a book is a friend that never deceives.