Upton Sinclair Quotes
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Fascism is capitalism plus murder.
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I have not only found good health, but perfect health; I have found a new state of being, a potentiality of life; a sense of lightness and cleanness and joyfulness, such as I did not know could exist in the human body.
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The methods by which the 'Empire of Business' maintains its control over journalism are four: First, ownership of the papers; second, ownership of the owners; third, advertising subsidies; and fourth, direct bribery. By these methods there exists in America a control of news and of current comment more absolute than any monopoly in any other industry.
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It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
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I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.
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Let us redeem our great words from base uses. Let that no longer call itself Love, which knows that it is not free!
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Human beings suffer agonies, and their sad fates become legends; poets write verses about them and playwrights compose dramas, and the remembrance of past grief becomes a source of present pleasure - such is the strange alchemy of the spirit.
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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.
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It is foolish to be convinced without evidence, but it is equally foolish to refuse to be convinced by real evidence.
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I just put on what the lady says. I've been married three times, so I've had lots of supervision.
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What life means to me is to put the content of Shelley into the form of Zola. The proletarian writer is a writer with a purpose; he thinks no more of 'art for art's sake' than a man on a sinking ship thinks of painting a beautiful picture in the cabin; he thinks of getting ashore - and then there will be time enough for art.
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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.
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All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.
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In the twilight, it was a vision of power.
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It was cold and clammy in the stone cell; they called it the 'cooler,' and used it to reduce the temperature of the violent and intractable. It was a trouble-saving device; they just left the man there and forgot him, and his own tormented mind did the rest.
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Now and then it occurs to one to reflect upon what slender threads of accident depend the most important circumstances of his life; to look back and shudder, realizing how close to the edge of nothingness his being has come.
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I discover that hardly a week passes that some one does not start a new cult, or revive an old one; if I had a hundred life-times I could not know all the creeds and ceremonies, the services and rituals, the litanies and liturgies, the hymns, anthems and offertories of Bootstrap-lifting.
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In a society dominated by the fact of commercial competition, money is necessarily the test of prowess, and wastefulness the sole criterion of power.
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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.
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Wherever there was a group of people, and a treasure to be administered, there Peter knew was backbiting and scandal and intriguing and spying, and a chance for somebody whose brains were 'all there.'
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Over the vast plain I wander, observing a thousand strange and incredible and terrifying manifestations of the Bootstrap-lifting impulse.