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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Fascism is capitalism plus murder.

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!

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.

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

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?

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 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.

They use everything about the hog except the squeal.

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.

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?

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

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

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

Into this wild-beast tangle these men had been born without their consent, they had taken part in it because they could not help it; that they were in jail was no disgrace to them, for the game had never been fair, the dice were loaded. They were swindlers and thieves of pennies and dimes, and they had been trapped and put out of the way by the swindlers and thieves of millions of dollars.

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