Top 90 Upton Sinclair Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

— Upton Sinclair

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2. “It is foolish to be convinced without evidence, but it is equally foolish to refuse to be convinced by real evidence.”

— Upton Sinclair

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3. “Fascism is capitalism plus murder.”

— Upton Sinclair

4. “One of the necessary accompaniments of capitalism in a democracy is political corruption.”

— Upton Sinclair

5. “You don’t have to be satisfied with America as you find it. You can change it. I didn’t like the way I found America some sixty years ago, and I’ve been trying to change it ever since.”

— Upton Sinclair

6. “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.”

— Upton Sinclair

7. “Pessimism is mental disease. It means illness in the person who voices it, and in the society which produces that person.”

— Upton Sinclair

8. “American journalism is a class institution, serving the rich and spurning the poor.”

— Upton Sinclair

9. “It appeared as if the whole world was one elaborate system, opposed to justice and kindness, and set to making cruelty and pain.”

— Upton Sinclair

10. “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.”

— Upton Sinclair

11. “All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescabably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.”

— Upton Sinclair

12. “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.”

— Upton Sinclair

13. “They use everything about the hog except the squeal.”

— Upton Sinclair

14. “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”

— Upton Sinclair

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

— Upton Sinclair

16. “The private control of credit is the modern form of slavery.”

— Upton Sinclair

17. “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 been able to get a decent existence for their bodies?”

— Upton Sinclair

18. “I say there is no modern evil which cannot be justified by these ancient texts; and there is nowhere in Christendom a clergy which cannot be persuaded to cite them at the demand of ruling classes.”

— Upton Sinclair

19. “We define journalism in America as the business and practice of presenting the news of the day in the interest of economic privilege.”

— Upton Sinclair

20. “Say the very simplest and most obvious things, say them as often as possible, and put into the saying all the screaming passion which one human voice can carry – that was Adolf Hitler’s technique.”

— Upton Sinclair

21. “The rich people not only had all the money, they had all the chance to get more; they had all the know-ledge and the power, and so the poor man was down, and he had to stay down.”

— Upton Sinclair

22. “In the twilight, it was a vision of power.”

— Upton Sinclair

23. “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.”

— Upton Sinclair

24. “The great packing machine ground on remorselessly, without thinking of green fields; and the men and women and children who were part of it never saw any green thing, not even a flower. Four or five miles to the east of them lay the blue waters of Lake Michigan; but for all the good it did them it might have been as far away as the Pacific Ocean. They had only Sundays, and then they were too tired to walk. They were tied to the great packing machine, and tied to it for life.”

— Upton Sinclair

25. “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.”

— Upton Sinclair

26. “Man is an evasive beast, given to cultivating strange notions about himself.”

— Upton Sinclair

27. “Dieve – but I’m glad I’m not a hog.”

— Upton Sinclair

28. “All truly great art is optimistic. The individual artist is happy in his creative work. The fact that practically all great art is tragic does not in any way change the above thesis.”

— Upton Sinclair

29. “They say that the best dog will turn cross if he be kept chained all the time, and it was the same with the man; he had not a thing to do all day but lie and curse his fate, and the time came when he wanted to curse everything.”

— Upton Sinclair

30. “Jurgis had come there, and thought he was going to make himself useful, and rise and become a skilled man; but he would soon find out his error – for nobody rose in Packingtown by doing good work. You could lay that down for a rule – if you met a man who was rising in Packingtown, you met a knave.”

— Upton Sinclair

31. “I don’t know whether anyone will care to examine my heart, but if they do, they will find two words there- ‘social justice.’ For that is what I have believed in and fought for.”

— Upton Sinclair

32. “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

33. “I find that all the fair and noble impulses of humanity, the dreams of poets and the agonies of martyrs, are shackled and bound in the service of organized and predatory Greed!”

— Upton Sinclair

34. “Day after day he roamed about in the arctic cold, his soul filled full of bitterness and despair. He saw the world of civilization then more plainly than ever he had seen it before; a world in which nothing counted but brutal might, an order devised by those who possessed it for the subjugation of those who did not.”

— Upton Sinclair

35. “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.”

— Upton Sinclair

36. “Here was a population, low-class and mostly foreign, hanging always on the verge of starvation, and dependent for its opportunities of life upon the whim of men every bit as brutal and unscrupulous as the old-time slave drivers; under such circumstances immorality was exactly as inevitable, and as prevalent, as it was under the system of chattel slavery. Things.”

— Upton Sinclair

37. “It lives and breathes in the light, because it has thousands of unfortunates toiling in the darkness. It lives and has its being in proud liberty because thousands are slaving for it, whose thraldom is the price of this liberty. This.”

— Upton Sinclair

38. “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.”

— Upton Sinclair

39. “In a society dominated by the fact of commercial competition, money is necessarily the test of prowess, and wastefulness the sole criterion of power.”

— Upton Sinclair

40. “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.”

— Upton Sinclair

41. “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?”

— Upton Sinclair

42. “He had been a reform member of the city council, he had been a Greenbacker, a Labor Unionist, a Populist, a Bryanite – and after thirty years of fighting, the year 1896 had served to convince him that the power of concentrated wealth could never be controlled, but could only be destroyed. He had published a pamphlet about it, and set out to organize a party of his own, when a stray Socialist leaflet had revealed to him that others had been ahead of him. Now.”

— Upton Sinclair

43. “There was only one earth, and the quantity of material things was limited. Of intellectual and moral things, on the other hand, there was no limit, and one could have more without another’s having less; hence “Communism in material production, anarchism in intellectual,” was the formula of modern proletarian thought. As.”

— Upton Sinclair

44. “The supreme crime of the church to-day is that everywhere and in all its operations and influences it is on the side of sloth of mind; that it banishes brains, it sanctifies stupidity, it canonizes incompetence.”

— Upton Sinclair

45. “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

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

— Upton Sinclair

47. “And now in the union Jurgis met men who explained all this mystery to him; and he learned that America differed from Russia in that its government existed under the form of a democracy. The officials who ruled it, and got all the graft, had to be elected first; and so there were two rival sets of grafters, known as political parties, and the one got the office which bought the most votes. Now.”

— Upton Sinclair

48. “In the evening I came home and read about the Messina earthquake, and how the relief ships arrived, and the wretched survivors crowded down to the water’s edge and tore each other like wild beasts in their rage of hunger. The paper set forth, in horrified language, that some of them had been seventy-two hours without food. I, as I read, had also been seventy-two hours without food; and the difference was simply that they thought they were starving.”

— Upton Sinclair

49. “As if political liberty made wage slavery any the more tolerable!”

— Upton Sinclair

50. “The musicians-how shall one begin to describe them? All this time they have been there, playing in a mad frenzy-all of this scene must be read, or said, or sung, to music. 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 corner of the high mansions of the sky.”

— Upton Sinclair