Top 400 Jack London Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “The toil of the traces seemed the supreme expression of their being, and all that they lived for and the only thing in which they took delight.”

— Jack London

202. “However, he was happy. He felt he was conquering nature. He laughed aloud. He felt he was stronger than the elements. In this type of weather animals hid in their holes and did not come out. He was out, fighting the elements. He was a man, master of the world.”

— Jack London

203. “There were not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to them.”

— Jack London

204. “They had seen life, and done deeds, and lived romances, but they did not know it.”

— Jack London

205. “I am a sick man – oh, not my body. It is my soul, my brain. I seem to have lost all values. I care for nothing. If you had been this way a few months ago, it would have been different. It is too late, now.”

— Jack London

206. “He paid two dollars and a half a month rent for the small room he got from his Portuguese landlady, Maria Silva, a virago and a widow, hard working and harsher tempered, rearing her large brood of children somehow, and drowning her sorrow and fatigue at irregular intervals in a gallon of the thin, sour wine that she bought from the corner grocery and saloon for fifteen cents. From detesting her and her foul tongue at first, Martin grew to admire her as he observed the brave fight she made.”

— Jack London

207. “Primitive communism, chattel slavery, serf slavery, and wage slavery were necessary stepping-stones in the evolution of society.”

— Jack London

208. “The swift changes in our industrial system are causing equally swift changes in our religious, political, and social structures. An unseen and fearful revolution is taking place in the fibre and structure of society. One can only dimly feel these things. But they are in the air, now, to-day. One can feel the loom of them – things vast, vague, and terrible.”

— Jack London

209. “Compared with White Fang, they were frail and flabby, and clutched life without any strength in their grip. White Fang had come straight from the Wild, where the weak perish early and shelter is vouchsafed to none. In neither his father nor his mother was there any weakness, nor in the generations before them.”

— Jack London

210. “She was pure, it was true, as he had never dreamed of purity; but cherries stained her lips.”

— Jack London

211. “His conclusion was that things were not always what they appeared to be. The cub’s fear of the unknown was an inherited distrust, and it had now been strengthened by experience. Thenceforth, in the nature of things, he would possess an abiding distrust of appearances.”

— Jack London

212. “A soldier, as Bernard Shaw has said, “ostensibly a heroic and patriotic defender of his country, is really an unfortunate man driven by destitution to offer himself as food for powder for the sake of regular rations, shelter, and clothing.”

— Jack London

213. “It is what we of the working class preach. We know, and well we know by bitter experience, that no appeal for the right, for justice, for humanity, can ever touch you.”

— Jack London

214. “And there were easements and satisfactions. To have a full stomach, to doze lazily in the sunshine–such things were remuneration in full for his ardours and toils, while his ardours and tolls were in themselves self-remunerative. They were expressions of life, and life is always happy when it is expressing itself. So the cub had no quarrel with his hostile environment. He was very much alive, very happy, and very proud of himself.”

— Jack London

215. “Then he dozed off to sleep and to dream dreams that for madness and audacity rivalled those of poppy-eaters.”

— Jack London

216. “I was not made for the desk and counting-house, for petty business squabbling, and legal jangling.”

— Jack London

217. “On the other hand, the great helpless mass of the population, the people of the abyss, was sinking into a brutish apathy of content with misery.”

— Jack London

218. “John Thornton stood over Buck, struggling to control himself, too convulsed with rage to speak. “If you strike that dog again, I’ll kill you,” he at last managed to say in a choking voice.”

— Jack London

219. “All I wanted,′ London said later, ’was a quiet place in the counry to write and loaf in and get out of Nature that something which we all need, only the most of us don’t know it.”

— Jack London

220. “And when, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at a star and howled long and wolflike, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him. And his cadences were their cadences, the cadences which voiced their woe and what to them was the meaning of the stiffness, and the cold, and dark.”

— Jack London

221. “Man cannot be worked worse than a horse is worked, and be housed and fed as a pig is housed and fed, and at the same time have clean and wholesome ideals and aspirations.”

— Jack London

222. “He felt strangely numb. As though from a great distance, he was aware that he was being beaten. The last sensations of pain left him. He no longer felt anything, though very faintly he could hear the impact of the club upon his body. But it was no longer his body, it seemed so far away.”

— Jack London

223. “You are one with a crowd of men who have made what they call a government, who are masters of all the other men, and who eat the food the other men get and would like to eat themselves.”

— Jack London

224. “I must give the events in their proper sequence.”

— Jack London

225. “We could not strike back, for we were starving; and it is the way of the world that when one man feeds another he is that man’s master.”

— Jack London

226. “There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise.”

— Jack London

227. “Sensation invested itself in form and color and radiance, and what his imagination dared, it objectified in some sublimated and magic way. Past, present, and future mingled; and he went on oscillating across the broad, warm world, through.”

— Jack London

228. “But especially he loved to run in the dim twilight of the summer midnights, listening to the subdued and sleepy murmurs of the forest, reading signs and sounds as a man may read a book, and seeking for the mysterious something that called – called, waking or sleeping, at all times, for him to come.”

— Jack London

229. “You are my Avis,” he said, “and you are also some one else. You are two women, and therefore you are my harem. At any rate, we are safe now. If the United States becomes too hot for us, why, I have qualified for citizenship in Turkey.”

— Jack London

230. “A wolf does not think like a human.”

— Jack London

231. “Had the cub thought in man-fashion, he might have epitomized life as a voracious appetite, and the world as a place wherein ranged a multitude of appetites, pursuing and being pursued, hunting and being hunted, eating and being eaten, all in blindness and confusion, with violence and disorder, a chaos of gluttony and slaughter, ruled over by chance, merciless, planless, endless.”

— Jack London

232. “What we wanted to do we went and did, on our legs upstanding, and we faced all reproof and censure on our legs upstanding, and did not hide behind the skirts of classical economists and bourgeois philosophers, nor behind the skirts of subsidized preachers, professors, and editors.”

— Jack London

233. “And don’t forget that it is the press, the pulpit, and the university that mould public opinion, set the thought-pace of the nation. As for the artists, they merely pander to the little less than ignoble tastes of the Plutocracy.”

— Jack London

234. “You can no more make water run up hill than can you cause the tide of economic evolution to flow back in its channel along the way it came.”

— Jack London

235. “The great majority of habitual drinkers are born not only without desire for alcohol, but with actual repugnance toward it. Not the first, nor the twentieth, nor the hundredth drink, succeeded in giving them the liking. But they learned, just as men learn to smoke; though it is far easier to learn to smoke than to learn to drink. They learned because alcohol was so accessible.”

— Jack London

236. “Surely there can be little in this world more awful than the spectacle of a strong man in the moment when he is utterly weak and broken.”

— Jack London

237. “The man, with his brain, can pierce the intoxicating mirage of things and contemplate a frozen universe in the most perfect indifference to him and his dreams.”

— Jack London

238. “A business man who was also a biologist and a sociologist would know, approximately, the right thing to do for humanity. But, outside the realm of business, these men are stupid. They know only business. They do not know mankind nor society, and yet they set themselves up as arbiters of the fates of the hungry millions and all the other millions thrown in. History, some day, will have an excruciating laugh at their expense.” I was not surprised when I had my.”

— Jack London

239. “The people of that age were phrase slaves. The abjectness of their servitude is incomprehensible to us. There was a magic in words greater than the conjurer’s art. So befuddled and chaotic were their minds that the utterance of a single word could negative the generalizations of a lifetime of serious research and thought. Such a word was the adjective UTOPIAN. The mere utterance of it could damn any scheme, no matter how sanely conceived, of economic amelioration or regeneration.”

— Jack London

240. “The hand descended. Nearer and nearer it came. It touched the ends of his upstanding hair. He shrank down under it. It followed down after him, pressing more closely against him. Shrinking, almost shivering. He still managed to hold himself together. It was a torment, this hand that touched him and violated his instinct. He could not forget in a day all the evil that had been wrought him at the hands of men.”

— Jack London

241. “In this manner had fought forgotten ancestors. They quickened the old life within him, the old tricks which they had stamped into the heredity of the breed were his tricks... And when, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at a star and howled long and wolflike, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him.”

— Jack London

242. “But the dog knew; all its ancestry knew, and it had inherited the knowledge. And it knew that it was not good to walk abroad in such fearful cold.”

— Jack London

243. “Wherever there is an ascendant class, a large portion of the morality emanates from its class interests and its class feelings of superiority.”

— Jack London

244. “Also he saw one dog, that would neither conciliate nor obey, finally killed in the struggle for mastery.”

— Jack London

245. “Insanity? The mental processes of a man with whom one disagrees, are always wrong. Where is the line between wrong mind and sane mind? It is inconceivable that any sane man can radically disagree with one’s most sane conclusions.”

— Jack London

246. “He had learned to get along without her. Her meaning was forgotten. There was no place for her in his scheme of things, as there was no place for him in hers.”

— Jack London

247. “Never did he fail to respond savagely to the chatter of the squirrel he had first met on the blasted pine.”

— Jack London

248. “The pitch to which he was aroused was tremendous. All the fighting blood of his breed was up in him and surging through him. This was living., though he did not know it. He was realizing his own meaning in the world; he was doing that for which he was made... He was justifying his existence, than which life can do no greater; for life achieves its summit when it does to the uttermost that which it was equipped to do.”

— Jack London

249. “Oh, I am not challenging your sincerity,” Ernest continued. “You are sincere. You preach what you believe. There lies your strength and your value – to the capitalist class.”

— Jack London

250. “Between us and the bottom of the sea was less than an inch of wood. And yet, I aver it, and I aver it again, I was unafraid.”

— Jack London