131 Quotes by Upton Sinclair

As if political liberty made wage slavery any the more tolerable!

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.

He forgot how he himself had been blind, a short time ago – after the fashion of all crusaders since the original ones, who set out to spread the gospel of Brotherhood by force of arms.

He had been a reform member of the city council, he had been a Greenbacker, a Labor Unionist, a Populist, a Bryanite – and after thirty years of fighting, the year 1896 had served to convince him that the power of concentrated wealth could never be controlled, but could only be destroyed. He had published a pamphlet about it, and set out to organize a party of his own, when a stray Socialist leaflet had revealed to him that others had been ahead of him. Now.

It was the same type of men all over the world. They tried to grab on another’s coal and steel and oil and gold; yet, the moment they were threatened by their wage slaves anywhere, they got together to fight against the common peril. Do it with the army, do it with gangsters, do it with the workers’ own leaders, buying them or seducing them with titles, honors, and applause!

If you wanted to understand a politician you mustn’t pay too much attention to his speeches, but find out who were his paymasters. A politician couldn’t rise in public life, in France any more than in America, unless he had the backing of big money, and it was in times of crisis like this that he paid his debts. X.

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

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.

How could they find out that their tea and coffee, their sugar and flour, had been doctored; that their canned peas had been colored with copper salts, and their fruit jams with aniline dyes?