35 Inspirational Upton Sinclair Quotes On Success

Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. was an American writer who wrote nearly 100 books and other works in several genres. Sinclair’s work was well known and popular in the first half of the 20th century, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943. In 1906, Sinclair acquired particular fame for his classic muck-raking novel The Jungle. The novel exposed labor and sanitary conditions in the U.S. meatpacking industry, causing a public uproar. In turn, this contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. May these Upton Sinclair Quotes On Success inspire you to take action so that you may live your dreams.

1. “They use everything about the hog except the squeal.” Upton Sinclair

2. “The remedy [for the Great Depression] is to give the workers access to the means of production, and let them produce for themselves, not for others, the American way.” Upton Sinclair

3. “Through fasting, I have found a perfect health, a new state of existence, a feeling of purity and happiness, something unknown to humans.” Upton Sinclair

4. “Fascism is capitalism plus murder.” Upton Sinclair

5. “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

6. “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

7. “They were the triumphant and insolent possessors; they had a hall, and a fire, and food and clothing and money, and so they might preach to hungry men, and the hungry men must be humble and listen. 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 managed to get a decent existence for their bodies?” Upton Sinclair

8. “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

9. “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

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

11. “Journalism is one of the devices whereby industrial autocracy keeps its control over political democracy; it is the day-by-day, between-elections propaganda, whereby the minds of the people are kept in a state of acquiescence, so that when the crisis of an election comes, they go to the polls and cast their ballots for either one of the two candidates of their exploiters.” Upton Sinclair

12. “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

13. “One of the necessary accompaniments of capitalism in a democracy is political corruption.” Upton Sinclair

14. “There are a score of great religions in the world, each with scores or hundreds of sects, each with its priestly orders, its complicated creed and ritual, its heavens and hells. Each has its thousands or millions or hundreds of millions of true believers each damns all the others with more or less heartiness – and each is a mighty fortress of graft.” Upton Sinclair

15. “Man is an evasive beast, given to cultivating strange notions about himself. He is humiliated by his simian ancestry, and tries to deny his animal nature, to persuade himself that he is not limited by its weaknesses nor concerned in its fate. And this impulse may be harmless, when it is genuine. But what are we to say when we see the formulas of heroic self-deception made use of by unheroic self-indulgence?” Upton Sinclair

16. “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

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

18. “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

19. “You can’t make somebody understand something if their salary depends upon them not understanding it.” Upton Sinclair

20. “The American People will take Socialism, but they won’t take the label. I certainly proved it in the case of EPIC [End Poverty in California]. Running on the Socialist ticket I got 60,000 votes, and running on the slogan to ‘End Poverty in California’ I got 879,000. I think we simply have to recognize the fact that our enemies have succeeded in spreading the Big Lie. There is no use attacking it by a front attack, it is much better to out-flank them.” Upton Sinclair

21. “When the masters of industry pay such sums for a newspaper, they buy not merely the building and the presses and the name; they buy what they call the “good-will”- that is, they buy you. And they proceed to change your whole psychology – everything that you believe about life. You might object to it, if you knew; but they do their work so subtly that you never guess what is happening to you!” Upton Sinclair

22. “But I have a conscience and a religious faith, and I know that our liberties were not won without suffering, and may be lost again through our cowardice. I intend to do my duty to my country.” Upton Sinclair

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

24. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Upton Sinclair

25. “All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.” Upton Sinclair

26. “The private control of credit is the modern form of slavery.” Upton Sinclair

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

28. “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

29. “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

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

31. “Turn over the pages of history and read the damning record of the church’s opposition to every advance in every field of science.” Upton Sinclair

32. “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

33. “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

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

35. “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

I hope you enjoyed these Upton Sinclair Quotes On Success. Do let us know which one was your favorite in the comments section below.

Check Out How “The Jungle” Changed American Food | The Poison Squad From American Experience | PBS:

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