More Quotes by Upton Sinclair
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!
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?
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?
Fascism is capitalism plus murder.
Journalism is one of the devices whereby industrial autocracy keeps its control over political democracy; it is the day-by-day, between-elections propaganda, whereby the minds of the people are kept in a state of acquiescence, so that when the crisis of an election comes, they go to the polls and cast their ballots for either one of the two candidates of their exploiters.
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.
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.
