"Man is an evasive beast, given to cultivating strange notions about himself."
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Quote collection
Upton Sinclair quotes (page 2 of 3)
53 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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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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"Turn over the pages of history and read the damning record of the church's opposition to every advance in every field of science. . . ."
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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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"Through fasting. . .I have found a perfect health, a new state of existence, a feeling of purity and happiness, something unknown to humans."
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"It was all so very businesslike that one watched it fascinated. It was pork-making by machinery, pork-making by applied mathematics. And yet somehow the most matter-of-fact person could not help thinking of the hogs; they were so innocent, they came so very trustingly; and they were so very human in their protests - and so perfectly within their rights! They had done nothing to deserve it; and it was adding insult to injury, as the thing was done here, swinging them up in this cold-blooded, impersonal way, without pretence at apology, without the homage of a tear."
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"It is the music which makes it what it is; it is the music which changes the place from the rear room of a saloon in back of the yards to a fairy place, a wonderland, a little comer of the high mansions of the sky."
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"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?"
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"We define journalism in America as the business and practice of presenting the news of the day in the interest of economic privilege."
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"Dad, as a good American, believed his newspapers."
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"They were the triumphant and insolent possessors; they had a hall, and a fire, and food and clothing and money, and so they might preach to hungry men, and the hungry men must be humble and listen. They were trying to save their souls- and who but a fool could fail to see that all that was the matter with their souls was that they had not managed to get a decent existence for their bodies?"
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"American journalism is a class institution, serving the rich and spurning the poor."
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"Pessimism is mental disease. It means illness in the person who voices it, and in the society which produces that person."
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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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"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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"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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"So the laws of good driving forbade you to go off the magic ribbon except in extreme emergencies. You were ethically entitled to several inches of margin at the right-hand edge; and the man approaching you was entitled to an equal number of inches; which left a remainder of inches between the two projectiles as they shot by. It sounds risky as one tells it, but the heavens are run on the basis of similar calculations, and while collisions do happen, they leave time enough in between for universes to be formed, and successful careers conducted by men of affairs."
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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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"And as for other men, who worked in tank-rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,-sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out into the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard! This contributed to the passing of the Pure Food Act of 1906."
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