Upton Sinclair Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Upton Sinclair quote about:
-
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
-- Upton Sinclair -
“But I have a conscience and a religious faith, and I know that our liberties were not won without suffering, and may be lost again through our cowardice. I intend to do my duty to my country.”
-- Upton Sinclair -
“All truly great art is optimistic. The individual artist is happy in his creative work. The fact that practically all great art is tragic does not in any way change the above thesis.”
-- Upton Sinclair -
“There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything that he desires is outside; and there is another kind where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside.”
-- Upton Sinclair -
“I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”
-- Upton Sinclair -
“One of the necessary accompaniments of capitalism in a democracy is political corruption.”
-- Upton Sinclair -
“Human beings suffer agonies, and their sad fates become legends; poets write verses about them and playwrights compose dramas, and the remembrance of past grief becomes a source of present pleasure - such is the strange alchemy of the spirit.”
-- Upton Sinclair -
“A large section of the idling classes of England get their incomes by believing that Jesus was born of a virgin and that Jonah swallowed a whale; and with the progress of science they were naturally finding this more and more difficult. A school of ingenious Bible-twisters arose, to invent symbolical and literary meanings for fairy tales, in order that people who no longer believed could continue with good conscience to collect the salaries of belief.”
-- Upton Sinclair -
“It was all so very businesslike that one watched it fascinated. It was pork-making by machinery, pork-making by applied mathematics. And yet somehow the most matter-of-fact person could not help thinking of the hogs; they were so innocent, they came so very trustingly; and they were so very human in their protests - and so perfectly within their rights! They had done nothing to deserve it; and it was adding insult to injury, as the thing was done here, swinging them up in this cold-blooded, impersonal way, without pretence at apology, without the homage of a tear.”
-- Upton Sinclair -
“All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescabably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.”
-- Upton Sinclair -
“The remedy [for the Great Depression] is to give the workers access to the means of production, and let them produce for themselves, not for others, . . . the American way.”
-- Upton Sinclair -
“I am sustained by a sense of the worthwhileness of what I am doing; a trust in the good faith of the process which created and sustains me. That process I call God.”
-- Upton Sinclair -
“So the laws of good driving forbade you to go off the magic ribbon except in extreme emergencies. You were ethically entitled to several inches of margin at the right-hand edge; and the man approaching you was entitled to an equal number of inches; which left a remainder of inches between the two projectiles as they shot by. It sounds risky as one tells it, but the heavens are run on the basis of similar calculations, and while collisions do happen, they leave time enough in between for universes to be formed, and successful careers conducted by men of affairs.”
-- Upton Sinclair -
“The American People will take Socialism, but they won't take the label. I certainly proved it in the case of EPIC [End Poverty in California]. Running on the Socialist ticket I got 60,000 votes, and running on the slogan to 'End Poverty in California' I got 879,000. I think we simply have to recognize the fact that our enemies have succeeded in spreading the Big Lie. There is no use attacking it by a front attack, it is much better to out-flank them.”
-- Upton Sinclair -
“In the twilight, it was a vision of power.”
-- Upton Sinclair -
“You don't have to be satisfied with America as you find it. You can change it. I didn't like the way I found America some sixty years ago, and I've been trying to change it ever since.”
-- Upton Sinclair -
“In a society dominated by the fact of commercial competition, money is necessarily the test of prowess, and wastefulness the sole criterion of power.”
-- Upton Sinclair -
“Through fasting. . .I have found a perfect health, a new state of existence, a feeling of purity and happiness, something unknown to humans.”
-- Upton Sinclair -
“The supreme crime of the church to-day is that everywhere and in all its operations and influences it is on the side of sloth of mind; that it banishes brains, it sanctifies stupidity, it canonizes incompetence.”
-- Upton Sinclair -
“I have not only found good health, but perfect health; I have found a new state of being, a potentiality of life; a sense of lightness and cleanness and joyfulness, such as I did not know could exist in the human body.”
-- Upton Sinclair -
“If we are the greatest nation the sun ever shone upon, it would seem to be mainly because we have been able to goad our wage-earners to this pitch of frenzy.”
-- Upton Sinclair -
“The first thing brought forth by the study of any religion, ancient or modern, is that it is based upon Fear, born of it, fed by it — and that it cultivates the source from which its nourishment is derived.”
-- Upton Sinclair -
“The proletarian writer is a writer with a purpose; he thinks no more of art for art's sake than a man on a sinking ship thinks of painting a beautiful picture in the cabin; he thinks of getting ashore - and then there will be time enough for art.”
-- Upton Sinclair -
“It is the music which makes it what it is; it is the music which changes the place from the rear room of a saloon in back of the yards to a fairy place, a wonderland, a little comer of the high mansions of the sky.”
-- Upton Sinclair -
“Wall Street had been doing business with pieces of paper; and now someone asked for a dollar, and it was discovered that the dollar had been mislaid.”
-- Upton Sinclair -
“Dad, as a good American, believed his newspapers.”
-- Upton Sinclair -
“All day long this man would toil thus, his whole being centered upon the purpose of making twenty-three instead of twenty-two and a half cents an hour; and then his product would be reckoned up by the census taker, and jubilant captains of industry would boast of it in their banquet halls, telling how our workers are nearly twice as efficient as those of any other country. If we are the greatest nation the sun ever shone upon, it would seem to be mainly because we have been able to goad our wage-earners to this pitch of frenzy.”
-- Upton Sinclair -
“There are a score of great religions in the world, each with scores or hundreds of sects, each with its priestly orders, its complicated creed and ritual, its heavens and hells. Each has its thousands or millions or hundreds of millions of true believers each damns all the others with more or less heartiness - and each is a mighty fortress of graft.”
-- Upton Sinclair -
“The private control of credit is the modern form of slavery.”
-- Upton Sinclair
You may also like:
-
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Activist -
Frank Norris
Novelist -
Gifford Pinchot
Former Governor of Pennsylvania -
Ida B. Wells
Journalist -
Ida Tarbell
Author -
Jack London
Author -
Jacob August Riis
Journalist -
Jane Addams
Sociologist -
Robert M. La Follette, Sr.
Former member of the U.S. Senate -
Samuel Gompers
Labor Union Leader -
Sinclair Lewis
Novelist -
Theodore Dreiser
Novelist -
Theodore Roosevelt
26th U.S. President -
W. E. B. Du Bois
Historian -
William Howard Taft
27th U.S. President -
William Jennings Bryan
Former United States Secretary of State -
Woodrow Wilson
28th U.S. President -
Susan B. Anthony
Women's rights activist
