More Quotes by 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.
The private control of credit is the modern form of slavery.
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.
Consider Christmas - could Satan in his most malignant mood have devised a worse combination of graft plus bunkum than the system whereby several hundred million people get a billion or so gifts for which they have no use, and some thousands of shop clerks die of exhaustion while selling them, and every other child in the Western world is made ill from overeating - all in the name of the lowly Jesus?
When the masters of industry pay such sums for a newspaper, they buy not merely the building and the presses and the name; they buy what they call the "good-will"- that is, they buy you. And they proceed to change your whole psychology - everything that you believe about life. You might object to it, if you knew; but they do their work so subtly that you never guess what is happening to you!
I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.
You can't make somebody understand something if their salary depends upon them not understanding it.
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.
They were the triumphant and insolent possessors; they had a hall, and a fire, and food and clothing and money, and so they might preach to hungry men, and the hungry men must be humble and listen. They were trying to save their souls- and who but a fool could fail to see that all that was the matter with their souls was that they had not managed to get a decent existence for their bodies?
