Quotes from Upton Sinclair

If you wanted to understand a politician you mustn't pay too much attention to his speeches, but find out who were his paymasters. A politician couldn't rise in public life, in France any more than in America, unless he had the backing of big money, and it was in times of crisis like this that he paid his debts. X

This melodrama differed from others in that it was not written, it was to be played impromptu, and only once; after that it would be precedent, and would determine the destinies of mankind perhaps for centuries. Each of the actors hoped to write it his way, and no living man could say what the dénouement would be.

Military men say that troops can stand twenty percent losses; more than that, they go to pieces. But we had many an outfit with only twenty percent survivors and they went on fighting.

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.

All that a rich man needed to be happy was to have no heart. If he had one, then all the gifts which fortune showered upon him might turn to dust and ashes in his hands.

I find that all the fair and noble impulses of humanity, the dreams of poets and the agonies of martyrs, are shackled and bound in the service of organized and predatory Greed!

Dreadful, unspeakably wicked men the Nazi chieftains were, and Lanny was haunted by the idea that it was his duty to give up all pleasures and all other duties and try to awaken the people of Western Europe to a realization of the peril in which they stood.

the state of California; state support for parish schools—or, if this cannot be had, exemption

Political slogans are like grain scattered to draw birds into a snare. Find out who's putting up the money for a political party, and then you know what it will do.

Life on board the Oriole exemplified the old-time saying: "Whose bread I eat, his song I sing

It was the same type of men all over the world. They tried to grab on another's coal and steel and oil and gold; yet, the moment they were threatened by their wage slaves anywhere, they got together to fight against the common peril. Do it with the army, do it with gangsters, do it with the workers' own leaders, buying them or seducing them with titles, honors, and applause!

Hitler was calling upon Almighty God to give him courage and strength to save the German people and right the wrongs of Versailles...and then to settle down and govern the county in the interest of those millions of oppressed little people for whom he spoke so eloquently.

What are we to say when we see asceticism preached to the poor by fat and comfortable retainers of the rich?

This was the sort of government the American Army wanted in order to win the war quickly, and it was the sort they would want after the war, with no nonsense from reformers and crackpots. The big businessmen were those who got things done; they were the men the big brass dealt with in Washington, and whom they understood and liked.

gentlemen farmers," meaning that they did no work, were all Republicans, and they put up the funds and maintained a smooth-running political machine.

That appeared to be the way of all evil, it compelled the good to cease being good and to meet evil on its own evil ground.

In a pluto-democracy, politics is the art of outwitting the voters, so the Honorable Ham would never say that he hated the labor unions and proposed to keep them down. What he said was that the Reds were plotting to seize America. Some fifteen years ago he had got himself appointed chairman of a committee to investigate the Communists. His definition of this word was rather vague, and included everybody who proposed any sort of change calculated to reduce the gulf between the rich and the poor.

Truth, honor, justice—were these real forces, real "forms" under the relativity theory? These were the questions with which Sir James Jeans and Sir Arthur Eddington were wrestling, and their answers gave Lanny Budd the courage he needed to go on living his lonely secret life.

A moment later a second guard approached and whispered to him, after which he said to Lumley-Gotham, Your son wishes to see you, sir. Has he been searched? inquired Lumley-Gotham. He has been searched, said the other.

the fate of dictators to have to listen to flattery and to grow more susceptible to it. There are few who dare to say No in their presence, and it becomes less and less tolerable to them to hear that presumptuous word.

The polls were still open, and Lanny stopped across the street and watched for a few minutes. There was an American flag on a staff before the old white frame town hall, the polling place, and a few people waiting in line—but no loitering, and no electioneering within a specified distance of the sacred spot. He had seen people fighting one another on so many parts of the earth's surface, and how he longed to teach them this dignified and orderly way of settling their problems.

America's leading newspaper proprietors, Mr. Hearst and Colonel McCormick, Cissy Patterson and Frank Gannett, were loyal friends of Nazi-Fascism, operating under democratic disguise. Their tens of millions of readers were by now thoroughly indoctrinated, and the mothers of America wanted nothing but to get their sons out of this world holocaust.

Here was the author of Mein Kampf, demonstrating his thesis that the bigger the lie the easier to get it believed, and that all you have to do is to keep on saying a thing often enough and you can make it the truth.

What these efficient gentlemen had done was to devise an arrangement whereby the profits of the world's industry flowed to them, automatically and inevitably; and what they meant by peace was that this system was to continue and that nobody should ever challenge or disturb it. What Robbie meant by order was that the exploiters of the different nations should confer and work out a fair division of the spoils.