Upton Sinclair quotes - page 2

Men of unlimited means live lives of unbridled lust, and then, in their old age, they are helpless victims of their own impulses. (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
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
Over the vast plain I wander, observing a thousand strange and incredible and terrifying manifestations of the Bootstrap-lifting impulse.
Upton Sinclair
In the course of my twenty years career as an assailant of special privilege, I have attacked pretty nearly every important interest in America. The statements I have made, if false, would have been enough to deprive me of a thousand times all the property I ever owned, and to have sent me to prison for a thousand times a normal man's life. I have been called a liar on many occasions, needless to say; but never once in all these twenty years has one of my enemies ventured to bring me into a court of law, and to submit the issue between us to a jury of American citizens.
Upton Sinclair
I'm going to stop squandering money for things I don't want. I'm going to stop accepting invitations, and meeting people I don't like and don't want to know.
Upton Sinclair
When the first savage saw his hut destroyed by a bolt of lightning, he fell down upon his face in terror. He had no conception of natural forces, of laws of electricity ; he saw this event as the act of an individual intelligence.
Upton Sinclair
In the most deeply significant of the legends concerning Jesus, we are told how the devil took him up into a high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time.
Upton Sinclair
The story of the hero who slays the devouring dragon was not merely a symbol of day and night, of summer and winter; it was a literal explanation of the phenomena, it was the science of early times.
Upton Sinclair
The great corporation which employed you lied to you, and lied to the whole country-from top to bottom it was nothing but one gigantic lie.
Upton Sinclair
To do that would mean, not merely to be defeated, but to acknowledge defeat- and the difference between these two things is what keeps the world going. (Upton Sinclair)
I wrote with tears and anguish, pouring into the pages all that pain which life had meant to me. Externally the story had to do with a family of stockyard workers, but internally it was the story of my own family. Did I wish to know how the poor suffered in winter time in Chicago? I only had to recall the previous winter in the cabin, when we had only cotton blankets, and had rags on top of us. It was the same with hunger, with illness, with fear. Our little boy was down with pneumonia that winter, and nearly died, and the grief of that went into the book.
Upton Sinclair
What life means to me is to put the content of Shelley into the form of Zola.
Upton Sinclair
I am a person who has never used violence himself. My present opinion is that people who have obtained the ballot should use it and solve their problems in that way.
Upton Sinclair
I know you are brave and unselfish people, making sacrifices for a great principle but I cannot join you.
Upton Sinclair
I intend to do what little one man can do to awaken the public conscience, and in the meantime I am not frightened by your menaces.
Upton Sinclair
The bishops and fathers of the Church, ambitious for their organization, fell for this scheme, and Satan went off laughing to himself. He had got everything he had asked from Jesus three hundred years before; he had got the world's greatest religion.
Upton Sinclair
It was the measure of a whole society - their ideals and their standards! It was the way they spent their time, repeating nasty scandals about each other; living in an atmosphere of suspicion and cynicism, with endless whispering and leering, and gossip of low intrigue.
Upton Sinclair
I think we simply have to recognize the fact that our enemies have succeeded in spreading the Big Lie.
Upton Sinclair
American capitalism is predatory, and American politics are corrupt: The same thing is true in England and the same in France; but in all these three countries the dominating fact is that whenever the people get ready to change the government, they can change it.
Upton Sinclair
Jesus, as we know, answered and said "Get thee behind me, Satan!" And he really meant it; he would have nothing to do with worldly glory, with "temporal power;" he chose the career of a revolutionary agitator, and died the death of a disturber of the peace. (Upton Sinclair)
I say if Germany be allowed to win this war - then we in America shall have to drop every other activity and devote the next twenty or thirty years to preparing for a last-ditch defence of the democratic principle.
Upton Sinclair
He failed to get Jesus, but he came again, to get Jesus' church.
Upton Sinclair
The American People will take Socialism, but they won't take the label.
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