Upton Sinclair Quotes

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

It is foolish to be convinced without evidence, but it is equally foolish to refuse to be convinced by real evidence.

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.

Fascism is capitalism plus murder.

One of the necessary accompaniments of capitalism in a democracy is political corruption.

I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.

The private control of credit is the modern form of slavery.

I don't know whether anyone will care to examine my heart, but if they do, they will find two words there- 'social justice.' For that is what I have believed in and fought for.

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.

You can't make somebody understand something if their salary depends upon them not understanding it.

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.

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.

All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescabably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.

Man is an evasive beast, given to cultivating strange notions about himself.

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.

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.

Turn over the pages of history and read the damning record of the church's opposition to every advance in every field of science. . . .

Through fasting. . .I have found a perfect health, a new state of existence, a feeling of purity and happiness, something unknown to humans.

Can you blame me if I am pursued by the thought of how much we could do to remedy social evils, if only we had an honest and disinterested press?

We define journalism in America as the business and practice of presenting the news of the day in the interest of economic privilege.

Dad, as a good American, believed his newspapers.

American journalism is a class institution, serving the rich and spurning the poor.

In a society dominated by the fact of commercial competition, money is necessarily the test of prowess, and wastefulness the sole criterion of power.

Pessimism is mental disease. It means illness in the person who voices it, and in the society which produces that person.

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.

In the twilight, it was a vision of power.

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.

The old wanderlust had gotten into his blood, the joy of the unbound life, the joy of seeking, of hoping without limit.

They use everything about the hog except the squeal.

I just put on what the lady says. I've been married three times, so I've had lots of supervision.

Over the vast plain I wander, observing a thousand strange and incredible and terrifying manifestations of the Bootstrap-lifting impulse.

An event of colossal and overwhelming significance may happen all at once, but the words which describe it have to come one by one in a long chain.

But the devil is a subtle worm; he does not give up at one defeat, for he knows human nature, and the strength of the forces which battle for him.

In the face of all his handicaps, Jurgis was obliged to make the price of a lodging, and of a drink every hour or two, under penalty of freezing to death.

Here was one more difficulty for him to meet and conquer.

She was part of the machine she tended, and every faculty that was not needed for the machine was doomed to be crushed out of existence.

In that country, rich or poor, a man was free... So America was a place of which lovers and young people dreamed.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

A wonderful privilege it was to be thus admitted into the soul of a man of genius, to be allowed to share the ecstasies and the agonies of his inmost life.