Top 10 Upton Sinclair Quotes at QuotationFun

Displaying Top 10 Upton Sinclair quotes

All Upton Sinclair Quotes

Our Biography page will tell you more about Upton Sinclair

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

Mammonart - an Essay in Economic Interpretation = Who Owns the Artists? - 1925

Art

Share

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

On his novel "The Jungle"- 1906.

Share

The reader will understand that I despise these "yellows"; they are utterly without honor, they are vulgar and cruel; and yet, in spite of all their vices, I count them less dangerous to society than the so-called "respectable" papers, which pretend to all the virtues, and set the smug and pious tone for good society--papers like the "New York Tribune" and the "Boston Evening Transcript" and the "Baltimore Sun," which are read by rich old gentlemen and maiden aunts, and can hardly ever be forced to admit to their columns any new or vital event or opinion. These are "kept" papers, in the strictest sense of the term, and do not have to hustle on the street for money. They serve the pocketbooks of the whole propertied class--which is the meaning of the term "respectability" in the bourgeois world. On the other hand the "yellow" journals, serving their own pocketbooks exclusively, will often print attacks on vested wealth, provided the attacks are startling and sensational, and provided the vested wealth in question is not a heavy advertiser.

The Brass Check - 1919.

Money

Share

I wrote with tears and anguish, pouring into the pages all that pain which life had meant to me. Externally the story had to do with a family of stockyard workers, but internally it was the story of my own family. Did I wish to know how the poor suffered in winter time in Chicago? I only had to recall the previous winter in the cabin, when we had only cotton blankets, and had rags on top of us. It was the same with hunger, with illness, with fear. Our little boy was down with pneumonia that winter, and nearly died, and the grief of that went into the book.

The Jungle, in American Outpost: A Book of Reminiscences - 1932.

Family

Share

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.

100%: the Story of a Patriot - 1920, Section 2.

Share

Let us redeem our great words from base uses. Let that no longer call itself Love, which knows that it is not free!

Love's Pilgrimage - 1911.

Love

Share

I have lived in Germany and know its language and literature, and the spirit and ideals of its rulers. Having given many years to a study of American capitalism, I am not blind to the defects of my own country; but, in spite of these defects, I assert that the difference between the ruling class of Germany and that of America is the difference between the seventeenth century and the twentieth. No question can be settled by force, my pacifist friends all say. And this in a country in which a civil war was fought and the question of slavery and secession settled! I can speak with especial certainty of this question, because all my ancestors were Southerners and fought on the rebel side; I myself am living testimony to the fact that force can and does settle questions - when it is used with intelligence. In the same way I say if Germany be allowed to win this war - then we in America shall have to drop every other activity and devote the next twenty or thirty years to preparing for a last-ditch defence of the democratic principle.

Letter of resignation from the Socialist Party - 1917.

Politics, War, Patriotism

Share

In the course of my twenty years career as an assailant of special privilege, I have attacked pretty nearly every important interest in America. The statements I have made, if false, would have been enough to deprive me of a thousand times all the property I ever owned, and to have sent me to prison for a thousand times a normal man's life. I have been called a liar on many occasions, needless to say; but never once in all these twenty years has one of my enemies ventured to bring me into a court of law, and to submit the issue between us to a jury of American citizens.

The Brass Check - 1919.

Patriotism, Legal

Share

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.

100%: the Story of a Patriot - 1920, Section 4.

Share

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."

100%: the Story of a Patriot - 1920, Section 2.

Share

Like or Follow us

Popular Authors

▪ Manzar Ayubi
▪ Vera Lynn
▪ Jean Smith
▪ Nawaz Sharif
▪ Imran Khan
▪ Tariq Aziz
▪ Sabiha Khanum
▪ Sushant Rajput
▪ Wes Unseld