Top 10 Famous Quotes by Upton Sinclair

Upton Sinclair, born on September 20, 1878, was an American writer and social reformer renowned for "The Jungle" (1906), which exposed the harsh conditions in the U.S. meatpacking industry, leading to significant food safety reforms. A prolific author of nearly 100 works, Sinclair won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943 for "Dragon's Teeth." He was also a political activist, notably running for Governor of California in 1934 with the EPIC platform. Sinclair's writings and activism had a lasting impact on American literature and social reform. He passed away on November 25, 1968.

Top 10 Famous Quotes by Upton Sinclair

1. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
— Upton Sinclair

2. "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."
— Upton Sinclair

3. "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

4. "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."
— Upton Sinclair

5. "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

6. "As if political liberty made wage slavery any the more tolerable!"
— Upton Sinclair

7. "Surely it is moderate to say that the dish-washing for a family of five takes half an hour a day; with ten hours as a day’s work, it takes, therefore, half a million able bodied persons --- mostly women --- to do the dish-washing of the country."
— Upton Sinclair

8. "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

9. "Fascism is capitalism plus murder."
— Upton Sinclair

10. "All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda."
— Upton Sinclair