Top 90 Upton Sinclair Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Do not let other people invade your personality. Remember that every human being is a unique phenomenon, and worth developing. You will meet many who have no resources of their own, and who will try to fasten themselves upon you. You will find others eager to tell you what to do and think and be. But it is better to go apart and learn to be yourself.”

— Upton Sinclair

52. “The state might say that it had taken a year to write the book, and the author might say it had taken thirty. Goethe said that every bon mot of his had cost a purse of gold. What.”

— Upton Sinclair

53. “It was the same type of men all over the world. They tried to grab on another’s coal and steel and oil and gold; yet, the moment they were threatened by their wage slaves anywhere, they got together to fight against the common peril. Do it with the army, do it with gangsters, do it with the workers’ own leaders, buying them or seducing them with titles, honors, and applause!”

— Upton Sinclair

54. “Dad, as a good American, believed his newspapers.”

— Upton Sinclair

55. “I just put on what the lady says. I’ve been married three times, so I’ve had lots of supervision.”

— Upton Sinclair

56. “They wish to build a new and better world, and I would be glad if they could succeed, and if I saw any hope of success I would join them. I ask for their plans, and they offer me vague dreams, in which as a man of affairs, I see no practicality. Is is like the the end of Das Rheingold: there is Valhalla, very beautiful, but only a rainbow bridge on which to get to it, and while the gods ma be able to walk on a rainbow, my investors and working people cannot.”

— Upton Sinclair

57. “Study and think and improve your mind, and keep it clear of all this fog of hatred and propaganda.”

— Upton Sinclair

58. “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

59. “He forgot how he himself had been blind, a short time ago – after the fashion of all crusaders since the original ones, who set out to spread the gospel of Brotherhood by force of arms.”

— Upton Sinclair

60. “Play your music, read your books, think your own thoughts, and never let yourselves be drawn into an argument! Not an altogether satisfactory way of life, but the only one possible in times when the world is changing so fast that parents and children may be a thousand years apart in their ideas and ideals.”

— Upton Sinclair

61. “What, then, was the difference between America and Moscow? The “muckraker” said it was a question of who owned the state. In America the people were supposed to own it, but most of the time the big businessmen bought it away from them. “It is privilege which corrupts politics,” was his phrase.”

— Upton Sinclair

62. “Just what,” answered the other, “would be the productive capacity of society if the present resources of science were utilized, we have no means of ascertaining; but we may be sure it would exceed anything that would sound reasonable to minds inured to the ferocious barbarities of capitalism. After.”

— Upton Sinclair

63. “Since his life had been caught up into the current of this great stream, things which had before been the whole of life to him came to seem of relatively slight importance; his interests were elsewhere, in the world of ideas. His outward life was commonplace and uninteresting; he was just a hotel-porter, and expected to remain one while he lived; but meantime, in the realm of thought, his life was a perpetual adventure. There was so much to know – so many wonders to be discovered!”

— Upton Sinclair

64. “All of this might seem diabolical, but the saloon-keeper was in no wise to blame for it. He was in the same plight as the manufacturer who has to adulterate and misrepresent his product. If he does not, some one else will.”

— Upton Sinclair

65. “The eloquent senator was explaining the system of protection; an ingenious device whereby the workingman permitted the manufacturer to charge him higher prices, in order that he might receive higher wages; thus taking his money out of his pocket with one hand, and putting a part of it back with the other. To the senator this unique arrangement had somehow become identified with the higher verities of the universe. It.”

— Upton Sinclair

66. “It is not the New Inquisition which is our enemy today; it is hereditary Privilege. It is not Superstition, but Big Business which makes use of Superstition as a wolf makes use of sheep’s clothing.”

— Upton Sinclair

67. “What they wanted from a hog was all the profits that could be got out of him; and that was what they wanted from the workingman, and also that was what they wanted from the public. What the hog thought of it, and what he suffered, were not considered; and no more was it with labor, and no more with the purchaser of meat.”

— Upton Sinclair

68. “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.”

— Upton Sinclair

69. “If you wanted to understand a politician you mustn’t pay too much attention to his speeches, but find out who were his paymasters. A politician couldn’t rise in public life, in France any more than in America, unless he had the backing of big money, and it was in times of crisis like this that he paid his debts. X.”

— Upton Sinclair

70. “How could they find out that their tea and coffee, their sugar and flour, had been doctored; that their canned peas had been colored with copper salts, and their fruit jams with aniline dyes?”

— Upton Sinclair

71. “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.”

— Upton Sinclair

72. “If you look at the people on this train, you will see that they are dressed much alike. The train itself is a standard product, and by means of it we travel from town to town selling products which are messengers of internationalism.”

— Upton Sinclair

73. “Was it a fact that every man had something in his life which palsied his arm, and struck him helpless in the battle for social justice? When.”

— Upton Sinclair

74. “The police, and the strikers also, were determined that there should be no violence; but there was another party interested which was minded to the contrary – and that was the press.”

— Upton Sinclair

75. “First, that a Socialist believes in the common ownership and democratic management of the means of producing the necessities of life; and, second, that a Socialist believes that the means by which this is to be brought about is the class conscious political organization of the wage-earners. Thus far they were at one; but no farther. To.”

— Upton Sinclair

76. “He was carried over the difficult places in spite of himself; and he went plunging away in mad career – a very Mazeppa-ride upon the wild horse Speculation.”

— Upton Sinclair

77. “Truly it seemed that a great people had gone mad; but it is a fact well known to alienists that you cannot convince a madman of his own condition, and only make him madder by trying.”

— Upton Sinclair

78. “Lanny, climbing the hill, carried a thought which by now had become his familiar companion: Why, oh, why did men have to make their lives so ugly? What evil spell was upon them that they wrangled and scolded, hated and feared? He.”

— Upton Sinclair

79. “What we have to do is to judge which side stands for freedom and enlightenment and which for medievalism and superstition.”

— Upton Sinclair

80. “Like all religious thinkers, he carries with his scholar’s equipment a pair of metaphysical wings, wherewith at any moment he may soar into the empyrean, out of reach of vulgar materialists, like you and me.”

— Upton Sinclair

81. “Hitler was calling upon Almighty God to give him courage and strength to save the German people and right the wrongs of Versailles... and then to settle down and govern the county in the interest of those millions of oppressed “little people” for whom he spoke so eloquently.”

— Upton Sinclair

82. “Here was one more difficulty for him to meet and conquer.”

— Upton Sinclair

83. “Don’t complain about our coffee; someday you may be old and weak yourself.”

— Upton Sinclair

84. “He is playing a bass part upon his cello, and so the excitement is nothing to him; no matter what happens in the treble, it is his task to saw out one long-drawn and lugubrious note after another, from four o’clock in the afternoon until nearly the same hour next morning, for his third of the total income of one dollar per hour.”

— Upton Sinclair

85. “Of late years, however, since his children were growing up, he had begun to value respectability, and had had himself made a magistrate; a position for which he was admirably fitted, because of his strong conservatism and his contempt for “foreigners.”

— Upton Sinclair

86. “But it is not likely that he had reference to the kind of anguish that comes with destitution, that is so endlessly bitter and cruel, and yet so sordid and petty, so ugly, so humiliating – unredeemed by the slightest touch of dignity or even of pathos. It is a kind of anguish that poets have not commonly dealt with; its very words are not admitted into the vocabulary of poets – the details of it cannot be told in polite society at all.”

— Upton Sinclair

87. “Military men say that troops can stand twenty percent losses; more than that, they go to pieces. But we had many an outfit with only twenty percent survivors and they went on fighting.”

— Upton Sinclair

88. “What are we to say when we see asceticism preached to the poor by fat and comfortable retainers of the rich?”

— Upton Sinclair

89. “Lanny smiled to himself. His chief called himself a “liberal,” and Lanny had been trying to make up his mind just what that meant. He decided that a liberal was a high-minded gentleman who believed the world was made in his own image.”

— Upton Sinclair

90. “To think that in the midst of the last desperate agony of war, with several “Big Berthas” dropping shells into the city every twenty minutes, with food scarce and fuel unobtainable, more than three thousand men and women had sat at easels and maintained their faith that art could not be destroyed, but was and would remain the supreme achievement and goal of life! Lanny.”

— Upton Sinclair

91. “Their frail human nature was subjected to a strain greater than it was made for; the fires of greed had been lighted in their hearts, and fanned to a white heat that melted every principle and every law.”

— Upton Sinclair

92. “Political slogans are like grain scattered to draw birds into a snare. Find out who’s putting up the money for a political party, and then you know what it will do.”

— Upton Sinclair

93. “All that a rich man needed to be happy was to have no heart. If he had one, then all the gifts which fortune showered upon him might turn to dust and ashes in his hands.”

— Upton Sinclair

94. “Life on board the Oriole exemplified the old-time saying: “Whose bread I eat, his song I sing.”

— Upton Sinclair

95. “In the beginning he had assumed that they did it out of the goodness of their hearts; but now that he had looked into their hearts, he rejected the explanation.”

— Upton Sinclair

96. “Dreadful, unspeakably wicked men the Nazi chieftains were, and Lanny was haunted by the idea that it was his duty to give up all pleasures and all other duties and try to awaken the people of Western Europe to a realization of the peril in which they stood.”

— Upton Sinclair

97. “All that men had felt and suffered had been recorded and preserved in musical sound, a heritage for those who had ears to hear and minds to understand.”

— Upton Sinclair

98. “There is something in us all, he said, that is greater than ourselves, that works through us and can be used in the making of character. The central core of life is personality. To respect the personality of others is the beginning of virtue, and to enforce respect for it is the first duty of the individual toward all forms of government, all organizations and systems which men contrive to enslave and limit their fellows.”

— Upton Sinclair