Quotes from Upton Sinclair

We grant that American citizens who have millions of dollars have a right to use them to poison the public mind; but surely we don't have to grant the right of foreigners to come in and intrigue against us.

I am like a man who looks at one side of a coin and then at the other, and they are different, and he can't decide which is the coin. I see co-operation, and that delights me; then I see repression, and that repels me. Which is the coin?

You know the old doctrine that the end justifies the means. I was reading some modern philosopher the other day and noted the statement that it is the means that determine the end.

No, but I can't help wishing that political and economic problems might be settled by free discussion and majority consent. At least I feel bound to advocate that method for my own country, and for all others which have established the democratic process.

for he seemed to have but one rule: to think of everything that ten thousand Württembergers could possibly want, and promise it to them, to be delivered on the day when they would elect the candidates

But you know how our kind of people are; we don't like violence and find it hard to believe in. Very sadly I'm beginning to wonder if we Socialists aren't caught between two millstones and destined to be ground up. We think that when we've educated the people and got a majority of the votes, the matter is settled. That is supposed to be the rule in the political game.

four divisions of magnificent paratroopers were dead in the snows of Russia or prisoners in Russian labor camps. Their Führer had just proclaimed three days of mourning for the three hundred thousand heroes who had been cut to pieces in front of Stalingrad—after he had forbidden them to surrender.

You mustn't fool yourself with the idea that you could hire experts to attend to things; for how could you know that a man was an expert, unless you knew as much as he did? Some day your foreman might drop dead, or some other fellow would buy him away from you, and then where would you be? Be your own expert, said Dad!

British capitalists don't want a Left government in Spain; they'd be afraid of severance taxes. They want what they call a strong government, one that holds labor down and puts the taxes on the consumer.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

Since this press campaign must be considered as an element of danger to the peace of the people, I have decided to carry through that strengthening of the German army which will give us the assurance that these threats of war against Germany will not some day be translated into bloody force.

So the young married couples crowded in with their parents, or they fixed up a shed, if they could find some scrap lumber, or they lived in a trailer, or in one room in a lodging house, cooking on a gas burner. That wasn't very happy, and moralists were shocked by the increase in the divorce rate.

That was the sort of reassurance a French authoritarian would value, and when Lanny perceived that his bait was being taken he went on to sing the praises of America as the classic land of big business, where every worker had been persuaded that he was soon to become a capitalist, or that, at the least, his children would.

Cautiously he ventured to suggest that the Fatherland had injured its cause by the exiling of able Jewish scientists. The German agreed and revealed in confidence that the greatest theoretical physicist in the world—so he called Werner Heisenberg—had ventured to approach no less a person than Reichsminister Himmler on the subject of the ban against the teaching of the Einstein theory of relativity in German universities.

the 'tobacco king' from Majorca? I'm told that he began as a tobacco smuggler, and now he has put up several million pesetas for the rebellion. They say that General Francisco Franco is the Caudillo he has picked.

the "two hundred families" which ruled France had made up their minds that their interests required the overthrow of the Third Republic, and the establishment of some sort of dictatorship which would break the power of the labor unions, as had been so efficiently done in Italy, Germany, Austria, and Spain.

Currency inflation is to the government what as anesthetic is to the surgeon; it provides an easy and painless way of separating the rich from their savings and reducing the wages of all employed persons in the community.

United States oil companies were taking Hitler's money and constructing huge refineries of aviation gasoline in Hamburg; also that American manufacturers of magnesium were selling it to Hitler to be used for making bombs.

Portugal was making money out of both sides in the war, and, as always, the rich were adding to their hoards while the poor discovered the meaning of inflation and that wages never kept up with the stealthy increase in the cost of food.

The working-class world was split into factions, which spent the greater part of their energies in fighting one another instead of concentrating upon the common enemy.

In the second decade of this century of enlightenment and progress, in our free American democracy, whose constitution proclaims religious toleration, and forbids the establishment by the state of any form of worship, I was made to serve a sentence of eighteen hours in the state prison of Delaware for playing a game of tennis on the Sabbath. I

So it is that political parties degenerate; so the common people give their devotion to a cause, and discover too late how they have been betrayed.

Men had invented means of production capable of making plenty for everyone, but their mental development had not kept up with their techniques, and their moral equipment was centuries behind. They were still predatory animals, trying to enrich themselves at the expense of others, and thus filling their hearts with jealousy and hatred.

They've got onto Hitler at last." "You think the British mean to fight him?" "They've got to make a stand somewhere, and they've pretty nearly reached the point. The Cabinet is split, and different members wobble this way and that; but even a near-Fascist like Beaverbrook has decided that they can't go on making concessions forever.