A World to Win Quotes

“Nazis didn’t go by looks, they went by instructions. Göring had said: “It is I who decide who is a Jew!”
― Upton Sinclair, A World to Win

“Life on board the Oriole exemplified the old-time saying: “Whose bread I eat, his song I sing”
― Upton Sinclair, A World to Win

“Laurel listened, too, and now and then stole glances at the rapt faces about her; so she learned what was in the hearts of the ill-clad and hungry people whom she had been watching on the streets of this war-torn city. They wanted beauty, they wanted love, they wanted the fire of the spirit, the dreams and the glory—all the gifts which Hansi Robin had been laboring for thirty years to put into his music.”
― Upton Sinclair, A World to Win

“I know, and I tell myself that I can’t have fixed principles, I have to judge each situation on its own merits or lack of them. I say: ‘I will be a Red for Yenan and a democratic Socialist for the United States.’ But the Communists won’t have it that way, and neither will the Socialists; both sides have come to hate the other worse than they hate the capitalists. I have known Socialists so exasperated by Communist dogmatism and arrogance that they have been driven completely into reaction; they still think they are Socialists, but they never say anything about how to get Socialism, they spend all their time denouncing the Reds.” “The longer I watch things, the more I realize that the world is in a mess,” said the wise lady whom this philosopher had chosen for his wife. “Let us make up our minds that we are going to try to understand all sides, and not expect to find it easy.” “This”
― Upton Sinclair, A World to Win

“No, but I can’t help wishing that political and economic problems might be settled by free discussion and majority consent. At least I feel bound to advocate that method for my own country, and for all others which have established the democratic process.”
― Upton Sinclair, A World to Win

“I am like a man who looks at one side of a coin and then at the other, and they are different, and he can’t decide which is the coin. I see co-operation, and that delights me; then I see repression, and that repels me. Which is the coin?”
― Upton Sinclair, A World to Win

“That was one of the first things they were to learn about subtropical China; never would you find a single square inch on which food might be grown that did not have food growing.”
― Upton Sinclair, A World to Win

“If he became Lizbeth’s husband, she would make him a little world exactly like this. It wouldn’t always be sea-bound, but would be bound by the limits of her understanding and interests. She would love him with absorption and watch him with the jealousy of a tigress. She would know that she was his intellectual inferior, and would fear all persons, men or women, who might claim to be his intellectual equals. If such persons got his time and attention, she would hate them; her feeling for her husband would come to be half love, half hate, that strange ambivalence which is so common and so little understood. Some day, sooner or later, Lanny would say: “I never really loved you, and I cannot stand hating you, so good-by.”
― Upton Sinclair, A World to Win

“You recall what I told you the first time you came to me. I couldn’t go any faster than the people would let me. I had to wait, and let events change their minds.”
― Upton Sinclair, A World to Win

“When the rich go over-board, politically speaking, they go all the way and with all their clothes on. They have been used to having what they want, and patience is apt to be the least of their virtues. Bessie Budd had joined the Communist Party, and she followed the Party line, keeping her eyes fixed upon it so closely that she couldn’t even see how it wobbled, and would be greatly irritated if you called her attention to the chart.”
― Upton Sinclair, A World to Win

“It was a split which ran right down the center of the leftwing movement, and which, in Lanny’s opinion, was responsible for the triumph of Nazi-Fascism. It was a difference of human types, set forth by the psychologist William James long before this split had occurred. There are tough-minded people and there are tender-minded people, and they do not agree about what is to be done in the world. The tender-minded among the leftwingers called themselves Social-Democrats; they believed in social justice and hoped to get it by the patient labor of education, through the democratic process of political struggle and popular consent. But the tough-minded said: “It is a dream and will never come true; the capitalist class will never permit it to happen.”
― Upton Sinclair, A World to Win

“Capitalist governments talk about liberty but what they mean is property. If they have to choose between a Nazi and a Red, they are for the Nazi ninety-nine times out of a hundred.”
― Upton Sinclair, A World to Win

“Even if you, a non-German, adopted the hateful creed, you didn’t really get anywhere; the true Herrenvolk would use you, but in their hearts they would despise you as a traitor to your own kind and a dupe of the Nazi Weltbetrag. The Nazis had chosen Loki, god of lies, for their Nordic deity, and all other peoples had to learn to live under his scepter.”
― Upton Sinclair, A World to Win

“This Senator of the hillbillies was one of the most active and determined advocates of Fascism in the Western World; but Lanny reflected that quite possibly he didn’t know it was Fascism and would have been indignant at the term. What he called it was Americanism, or plain hundred-per-cent patriotism.”
― Upton Sinclair, A World to Win

“The propaganda of this bunch is anti-Jew, anti-Russian, and to some extent anti-British. It is closely tied up with the Catholic hierarchy—the Papal Knights and the Papal Delegates and our millionaires who back them.” “There you have it! Franco Spain, and the intrigues of the Nazis in South America—these are all parts of the same world conspiracy!”
― Upton Sinclair, A World to Win

“That’s exactly why the Cagoule was never purged in France; there were more than five hundred army officers involved in the plot, and the Cabinet voted against Léon Blum and Marx Dormoy, who wanted to root them out. The result was, they stayed in the army and went on making appeasement propaganda, even in the midst of war.”
― Upton Sinclair, A World to Win

“What the American people do not realize is that officialdom today is big business. The higher men associate exclusively with the plush-lined set. Imagine any one of them putting his feet under the dinner table of a poor man!”
― Upton Sinclair, A World to Win

“And you won’t need any assurance that I agree with you about Hearst. He is one of the most unscrupulous and most dangerous men in America. He stops at nothing to get his way. And there are many like him.”
― Upton Sinclair, A World to Win

“And in the same way, in the palaces of privilege many generations of babies will be born who will eat what is fed to them and believe what is told to them, and grow up to be perfectly conventional members of fashionable society, wearing exactly the right clothes, thinking exactly the right thoughts, and doing exactly what all the other members of their set consider proper. But once in a blue moon will appear a freak, a black sheep, a crackpot—there will be many names for him—a child who will insist upon asking questions, and trying to make sure the answers are right; who will think for himself, and not as all the others think; who will not be sure that God in His Infinite Wisdom has entrusted to him the care of the property interests of the country.”
― Upton Sinclair, A World to Win

“A family was supposed to be living there, but probably, like most rich people, they were away from home most of the time. Lanny had observed that the more money people had, the harder they found it to escape boredom.”
― Upton Sinclair, A World to Win

“The more things had cost the better they were and the more they were talked about, which was the best of all. “Three million dollars!” people would say about the palace, and their voices would be lowered as if they were speaking of the dwelling place of deity.”
― Upton Sinclair, A World to Win

“The Rightists called themselves America Firsters, and their opponents called them Fascists; the Leftists called themselves Liberals, and their opponents called them Reds.”
― Upton Sinclair, A World to Win

“In countries where the people have the ballot you have to promise them something desirable, otherwise the opposition will outbid you.”
― Upton Sinclair, A World to Win

“Lanny thought it was no accident that Hearst had sought refuge in this screen world; his personality and his life had been an incarnation of the same treason to the soul of man. For more than half a century his papers had been feeding scandal and murder to the American public; he had been setting psychological traps for their pennies and nickels, and because these traps succeeded, his contempt for the victims had been confirmed. By such means he had accumulated the second greatest fortune in America, and when he had got it he didn’t know what to do with it, except to build this caricature of a home, this costliest junk yard on the earth. Here it was, and he had invited a swarm of courtiers and sycophants, and entertained them by presenting them with a caricature of themselves, a world as empty and false as San Simeon itself.”
― Upton Sinclair, A World to Win

“Very few towns, and rivers mostly dry beds; a land of which vast tracts were kept for grazing by wealthy owners who didn’t want settlers and money so much as they wanted space and fresh air. Only a land-values tax could have reached them, and there could be no such tax because they owned the newspapers and controlled both political machines”
― Upton Sinclair, A World to Win

“for one of the stock products of Hollywood had become anti-Nazi pictures, and Lanny’s intimate stories would be useful to writers, producers, directors, costumers, property men, and on down the line.”
― Upton Sinclair, A World to Win

“He explained Adi’s propaganda technique of choosing a big lie and repeating it incessantly until everybody believed it;”
― Upton Sinclair, A World to Win

“People in Hollywood found it as extraordinary to meet someone who had been in the same room with Hitler as Lanny found it to be in the same room with Charles Laughton and Bette Davis.”
― Upton Sinclair, A World to Win

“The reply was: “Whom shall I say, sir?”—in smart society the only persons who bother with grammar are the butler and the social secretary.”
― Upton Sinclair, A World to Win

“It was, he discovered, like all California towns, built haphazard, a jumble of anybody’s whims, with half its spaces empty because people were holding them, waiting for values to rise.”
― Upton Sinclair, A World to Win