Upton Sinclair

Novelist, Activist

Upton Sinclair was an American writer and social activist known for his novel 'The Jungle,' which exposed the harsh realities of the meatpacking industry.

Born
September 20, 1878
Died
April 25, 1968
Quotes
53
Rank
#161

Quote collection

Upton Sinclair quotes (page 3 of 3)

53 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

Upton Sinclair Novelist, Activist
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"All day long this man would toil thus, his whole being centered upon the purpose of making twenty-three instead of twenty-two and a half cents an hour; and then his product would be reckoned up by the census taker, and jubilant captains of industry would boast of it in their banquet halls, telling how our workers are nearly twice as efficient as those of any other country. 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."

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"There are a score of great religions in the world, each with scores or hundreds of sects, each with its priestly orders, its complicated creed and ritual, its heavens and hells. Each has its thousands or millions or hundreds of millions of true believers each damns all the others with more or less heartiness - and each is a mighty fortress of graft."

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"I am sustained by a sense of the worthwhileness of what I am doing; a trust in the good faith of the process which created and sustains me. That process I call God."

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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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"A large section of the idling classes of England get their incomes by believing that Jesus was born of a virgin and that Jonah swallowed a whale; and with the progress of science they were naturally finding this more and more difficult. A school of ingenious Bible-twisters arose, to invent symbolical and literary meanings for fairy tales, in order that people who no longer believed could continue with good conscience to collect the salaries of belief."

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"The old wanderlust had gotten into his blood, the joy of the unbound life, the joy of seeking, of hoping without limit."

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"They use everything about the hog except the squeal."

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"Over the vast plain I wander, observing a thousand strange and incredible and terrifying manifestations of the Bootstrap-lifting impulse."

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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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"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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"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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"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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