Quotes from Upton Sinclair

Jesse sounded quite fierce, but basically he was a kind-hearted man who would and frequently did give his last franc to a comrade in distress. What he wanted was a just world, and the preliminary to this was for the rich to get off the backs of the poor. Since dialectical materialism demonstrated that they wouldn't, the thing to do was to throw them off.

You have many advantages over him, but there's one advantage he has over you. He knows a lot more about you than you know about him. Also, he understands your ideas better than you understand his.

Suddenly the events of the time took shape in his imagination as a duel of wills between these two: one the champion of democracy, of government by popular consent, of the rights of the individual to think his own thoughts, to speak his own mind, to live his own life so long as he did not interfere with the equal rights of his fellows; the other the champion of those ancient dark forces of tyranny and oppression which had ruled the world before the concept of freedom had been born.

You see, son, our business men are trading with the Germans all the time, regardless of politics. Standard Oil has a big deal regarding patent rights with I. G. Farben, the German dye trust, and so have the du Ponts. The A.E.G., the electrical trust, is in the same position, and I don't doubt that the Hermann Goring Stahlwerke have many such understandings in America.

In spite of the food shortages the British people were living better than ever in their lives before, the reason being that what there was got distributed more fairly.

but no, if she had been here, he would have been driven to take the side against her. This wasn't perversity, he would insist; he was trying to see the problem from all of its many sides, and argued against all persons who wanted to see only one side.

If faith healed as Parsifal had insisted he had been proving for thirty years, was it not advisable for men and women to acquire some? It was, the old gentleman insisted, something different from reason; it was something that you proved by experiment. You had faith in peace and you had peace; you had faith in health and you had health.

As a matter of fact there wasn't much to choose between Nazi and British radios in this crisis, so far as moral character was concerned; it was all "propaganda," serving the purposes of governments which didn't want their publics to realize what they were up to.

When will they stop following leaders who build their monuments out of millions of human skulls?" The son of Budd-Erling was perhaps the least happy man in that famous old church at the moment. He had little admiration for Napoleon Bonaparte, and still less for his Austrian imitator.

if we don't break down England's caste system, we'll find this war was hardly worth fighting." Lanny agreed with all that; but he wanted to shake his head sadly when the flyer went on to say: "There will be a different England after this war. Our people will never be content with the old life, after the sacrifices they have made." Lanny had heard exactly the same words from Alfy's father during World War I, before this youngster had been born.

you have to consult the works of Lenin, who told his disciples that everything was right that furthered the cause of the proletarian revolution, and that Communists must be prepared to lie and cheat for the cause.

couldn't say anything comforting, for he knew that civil wars are not polite; he knew, what these privileged people had never troubled to learn, the age-old wrongs which had set the fires of hatred to blazing in the hearts of wage-slaves.

He didn't believe in the system of monopoly capitalism any more than Lanny did, and he didn't care if his system of relief by public spending brought the profiteers nearer to their doom. He had been quoted as saying about the program of the New Deal: "We shall spend and spend, and tax and tax, and elect and elect.

Lanny had read an item to the effect that the Army was dealing with shell-shock cases by means of suggestion implanted by a phonograph record played while the patient slept. They had a device to make radio records audible under the pillows of airplane pilots in training, and when they woke up in the morning they knew their lessons.

Her past life had become a sort of fairy tale, to which she listened gladly and asked questions. After the treatment had continued for two or three weeks she began to exclaim, "I believe I remember that!

Memories did not come in a rush, but little by little; and perhaps that was just as well. She was getting back her interest in life, she was learning to live in this new-old world and be useful in it, much more so than she had been in the past, for she had been a self-centered person, ravenous for pleasure and praise.

The small island of Okinawa, close to Japan, had required nearly three months to capture; a hundred and twenty thousand Japanese had been killed or driven to suicide, and only eight thousand captured—which showed the kind of war it was.

You notice the General insists upon getting his planes ahead of any other customers. I take it that something is going to happen this spring.

He knew that armies were being transported from the Mediterranean to the Far East and that the invasion was set for November. Patton had told him that they were reckoning upon a million casualties, more than the British, French, and Americans had sustained in all the European fighting. A terrible prospect indeed, and one that weighed upon the consciences of two idealists dreaming peace on earth and good will toward men.

Hitler has written in his book that you can get any lie believed if you repeat it often enough; and especially if it's a big lie—because people will say that nobody would dare to tell one as big as that. It is no exaggeration to say that he has made Germany into a headquarters of the Lie; he has told so many and so often that nobody in his country has any means of distinguishing truth from falsehood.

For eight years he had been a satellite of F.D.R., revolving about him; now suddenly there was no F.D.R., and Lanny was an asteroid or something, wandering alone through space.

The marriage would have been at once, if they had had their way; but this would mean that they would have to do without any wedding feast, and when they suggested this they came into conflict with the old people.

forceful men of the people went into politics, their hearts bleeding for the wrongs of the poor; so they collected votes and built up a political machine, which they used to blackmail their way to fortune.

Most of the boys Lanny had played with here, slightly older than himself, had died in Flanders. The sons they had left behind had died in the recent war; but the breed went on—generation after generation born, raised, educated at great expense and trouble, only to be slaughtered on some foreign field.