Upton Sinclair quotes

Upton Sinclair was an American writer, journalist, and social reformer, celebrated for his influential works exposing social injustices. His novel "The Jungle" revealed harsh conditions in the U.S. meatpacking industry and led to widespread public outcry. He became one of the most prominent voices for progressive change in early 20th-century America. Here are 60 of his quotes:

Fascism is capitalism plus murder.

Upton Sinclair

I just put on what the lady says. I've been married three times, so I've had lots of supervision.

Upton Sinclair

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

Upton Sinclair

In the twilight, it was a vision of power.

Upton Sinclair

All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.

Upton Sinclair

They use everything about the hog except the squeal.

Upton Sinclair

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.

Upton Sinclair

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.

Upton Sinclair

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.

Upton Sinclair

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

Upton Sinclair

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

Upton Sinclair

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.

Upton Sinclair

If we are the greatest nation the sun ever shone upon, it would seem to be mainly because we have been able to goad our wage-earners to this pitch of frenzy.

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.

Upton Sinclair

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.

Upton Sinclair

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."

Upton Sinclair

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.

Upton Sinclair

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.

Upton Sinclair

He was burning with a sense of outrage. He had been tricked and made a fool of; he had been used and flung aside. And now there was nothing he could do - he was utterly helpless. What affected him most was his sense of the overwhelming magnitude of the powers which had made him their puppet; of the utter futility of the efforts that he or any other man could make against them. They were like elemental, cosmic forces; they held all the world in their grip, and a common man was as much at their mercy as a bit of chaff in a tempest.

Upton Sinclair

When Mr. John P. Gavit, managing editor of the New York Evening Post, wrote to Mr. Melville E. Stone, general manager of the Associated Press, that I had a reputation "as an insatiable hunter of personal publicity," what Mr. Gavit meant was that I was accustomed to demand and obtain more space in newspapers than the amount of my worldly possessions entitled me to.

Upton Sinclair

Private ownership of tools, a basis of freedom when tools are simple becomes a basis of enslavement when tools are complex.

Upton Sinclair

I intend to do what little one man can do to awaken the public conscience, and in the meantime I am not frightened by your menaces. I am not a giant physically; I shrink from pain and filth and vermin and foul air, like any other man of refinement; also, I freely admit, when I see a line of a hundred policemen with drawn revolvers flung across a street to keep anyone from coming onto private property to hear my feeble voice, I am somewhat disturbed in my nerves. But I have a conscience and a religious faith, and I know that our liberties were not won without suffering, and may be lost again through our cowardice. I intend to do my duty to my country.

Upton Sinclair