Quotes from Upton Sinclair

That was one of Monck's troubles; the other was at the opposite end of the social scale—the Communists. They were making all the difficulties they could for Socialists, as well as for Americans; they wanted everything to fail, not merely with capitalism, but also with Social Democracy, in order that the workers might be driven to Communism.

There, as in France, politicians wanted one thing and businessmen wanted another, and the latter had to pay, but they managed to get back still more. Businessmen knew that wars came and went, but business continued, and its interests were permanent

Of course it was terrible that men went to war and killed one another; but for that you had to blame nature, not the Budd family.

she was the kindest of souls; if she had ever done harm to any human being it was because the social system was too complicated for her to understand the consequences of her actions.

Such were the cruel terms upon which their life was possible, that they might never have nor expect a single instant's respite from worry, a single instant in which they were not haunted by the thought of money.

Old Russia had had virtually no middle class, and the governing class had been paralyzed by defeat in war. But other countries had a large middle class, self-conscious and powerful, and when you tried to jam through your proletarian revolution, what you got was Mussolini or Hitler!

They had let these officials into their companies, and thus obtained permission to ship their wealth to their banks in North Africa. Lanny heard about it from one source after another, and some said that ten billion francs had come to Algiers, and others said twenty billion, and all agreed that it was still coming.

the dark shadow of conflict was looming over the world again; but no use to say it, for people didn't want to believe it and they knew how to believe what they chose.

Germany was to be divided into four zones, each to be governed by one of the four nations, America, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. To anyone who really wanted peace this arrangement was ominous, for it could mean only that the Big Four distrusted their ability to agree and had agreed upon a series of arguments and squabbles for an indefinite time.

What the masses in America read was newspapers and low-priced magazines; also, they listened to the radio and went to the movies. If you wanted mass circulation, those were the ways to get it. They were all enormously expensive and conducted for the profit of private owners; a genuine liberal among the owners was as rare as a white blackbird, and that was why opinion in America lagged so far behind mechanical development—including the aforesaid A-bomb.

The fact was, these issues had become so urgent and feelings ran so high that tolerance was too difficult. All over France the various groups isolated themselves, and didn't go where they would meet their political rivals.

Your armies are going to pieces, but theirs stay put, and the same applies to the air forces. They are probing for weak spots all over the world, and wherever they find one they will move in. Their propaganda war has never been so active.

Commercial men weren't looked down upon as they had been in old England; for, after all, this was an industrial age, and business and politics were pretty thoroughly mixed. The recent Prime Minister, Mr. Stanley Baldwin, had been an ironmaster, and the present Prime Minister, Mr. Neville Chamberlain, was an arms manufacturer from Birmingham.

The city was a parasite upon the farm; the bourgeois slept late and wore fine clothes and did no real work, but charged the peasant high prices for tools and clothing and all the things he had to have.

Capitalist governments talk about liberty but what they mean is property. If they have to choose between a Nazi and a Red, they are for the Nazi ninety-nine times out of a hundred.

This Austrian painter was the Führer's favorite; he would delight to look upon the weatherbeaten countenance of an old Bauer of the Innthal, where the greatest man in the world had been born. Adi would find in those wrinkled features the honesty, fidelity and credulity which were the virtues he wanted in his peasants, and meant to teach to all the peasants of the earth, not excluding North America.

Each of the four would have its own idea of what Germany and the Germans ought to be and would proceed to make them over in its image: a Communist East Germany, a Socialist North-central Germany, a Big-Business, Private-Enterprise South-central Germany, and a Bourgeois Southwest Germany, hated, feared, and kept as poor as possible.

The Fascist groups were becoming more and more active, and were resorting to gangsterism, as in all the countries bordering on Italy and Germany. They were provided with funds not only from French capitalist sources, but also from abroad.

Emperor Trajan he read an inscription from those same ancient days and in that same spirit: "To hunt, to bathe, to play, to laugh, that is to live.

What were the workers going to do in the face of such a situation? Arm themselves? But that gave the enemy a basis for charging that the workers were planning civil war. The reactionaries had nine-tenths of the money, also nine-tenths of the press with which to spread confusion and fear. Said Raoul: "The extreme Left has Russia for a pattern and the Right has Italy and Germany, but where is the pattern for those who believe in the democratic process?

The British owned immensely valuable properties in Spain—Rio Tinto copper, for example, indispensable in making munitions—and certainly they didn't want strikes and Red commissars in those mines. On the other hand it might be fatal in wartime to have German submarines based on the Atlantic, and France enclosed in a pair of Nazi pincers.

All over Prussia Göring was replacing police chiefs with Nazis, and the Stormtroopers were now attending political meetings in force, stopping those in which the government was criticized.

In wartime it appeared that nobody wanted to see both sides of any question. IV

The history of Germany is becoming a melodrama," wrote the Jewish financier. "In times to come people will refuse to believe it.