“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked
“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.”
― Upton Sinclair
“Into this wild-beast tangle these men had been born without their consent, they had taken part in it because they could not help it; that they were in jail was no disgrace to them, for the game had never been fair, the dice were loaded. 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.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
“Fascism is capitalism plus murder.”
― Upton Sinclair
“One of the necessary accompaniments of capitalism in a democracy is political corruption.”
― Upton Sinclair
“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.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
“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.”
― Upton Sinclair, Mammonart: An Essay in Economic Interpretation
“Dad, as a good American, believed his newspapers.”
― Upton Sinclair, Oil!
Sinclair was by every account I can find an ardent socialist of the Fabian model.
It never ceases to amaze me how stupid are the people who gain such notoriety.
Only the moron can imagine that the solution to crony capitalism is (axiomatically) crony socialism.
Lest we forget, true believers in communism let neither Stalin nor Mao taint their belief in the peace and humanity of their system. Somehow, no matter how naturally all such systems turn into mass-murdering swamps, their believers think the circle can be squared.
Proudhon, another socialist, got it right: Liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of order.
People want order. But they paradoxically move toward the static control model of a modern prison in their zeal for order. What they get is chaos.