O Shepherd, Speak! Quotes

“couldn’t”
― Upton Sinclair, O Shepherd, Speak!

“I assure you, Mr. Truman, you have to choose between a Socialist Europe and a Communist Europe, and I think the same thing applies to Asia. If we try to impose ‘private enterprise,’ we shall have to do it with military forces, and do it over and over again, putting down one attempt at revolution after another.”
― Upton Sinclair, O Shepherd, Speak!

“Much as they hated the idea, it was impossible to disarm in the face of Communist imperialism. America had to be able at all times to convince the Soviet leaders that they could not win a war.”
― Upton Sinclair, O Shepherd, Speak!

“telling you things which he not merely knew were not true, but which he knew that you knew were not true. A bitter lesson you had to learn, soon or late, that truth had no meaning to any Communist; the only question that concerned him was the advancement of his cause.”
― Upton Sinclair, O Shepherd, Speak!

“All our efforts will be vain unless we can show that our democratic system works, and that its end product is justice and opportunity for the common man.”
― Upton Sinclair, O Shepherd, Speak!

“The future of Europe rests between the Communists and the Socialists, and if you try to stop Socialism you will drive the workers straight into the Communist camp. Socialization of basic industry and free co-operatives in small manufacturing and retail trade—that is the only program that has any chance of winning Western Europe and keeping it.”
― Upton Sinclair, O Shepherd, Speak!

“Our people are afraid of government propaganda. They are afraid to give too much power to politicians—it might be turned against the people.” “But you did it during the war!” “We did it, but we hated it, and we stopped it as soon as we could. The Office of War Information was abolished almost at once. When we have won a war we think everything is settled, and we hurry home to our private affairs.”
― Upton Sinclair, O Shepherd, Speak!

“Propaganda! Propaganda! Propaganda! You must set up the most powerful radio stations in the world and answer the Communists in every language. You must employ the best writers and the best speakers you have, every skill of every sort, and meet the falsehoods and smash them. You must print cheap newspapers and leaflets in every language and flood every country with them. You must smuggle them into Russia by every device you can think of. It’s a war—they have declared it, and you have to pitch in and win.”
― Upton Sinclair, O Shepherd, Speak!

“Your armies are going to pieces, but theirs stay put, and the same applies to the air forces. They are probing for weak spots all over the world, and wherever they find one they will move in. Their propaganda war has never been so active.”
― Upton Sinclair, O Shepherd, Speak!

“The Americans dealt with the Socialists only because they had to, and forbade them to take any steps toward carrying out their program; as for the Russians, what they wanted was to shoot the Socialist leaders and throw their followers into concentration camps. They were doing that in their own zone of Germany; they had got up a so-called “Socialist Unity Party,” to be run by the Communists, and if the Socialist leaders joined that they were all right, but if they didn’t, they disappeared and nobody knew what had become of them. Kidnapings across the line were common, and Monck said that he would never go anywhere near the line at night. It was quite like the old Nazi days.”
― Upton Sinclair, O Shepherd, Speak!

“That was one of Monck’s troubles; the other was at the opposite end of the social scale—the Communists. They were making all the difficulties they could for Socialists, as well as for Americans; they wanted everything to fail, not merely with capitalism, but also with Social Democracy, in order that the workers might be driven to Communism.”
― Upton Sinclair, O Shepherd, Speak!

“When they get through, the country will be in the hands of the very same men who financed Hitler and who will have no idea in the world but to finance some new ‘strong’ government to keep the Socialists from winning an election.”
― Upton Sinclair, O Shepherd, Speak!

“What these efficient gentlemen had done was to devise an arrangement whereby the profits of the world’s industry flowed to them, automatically and inevitably; and what they meant by peace was that this system was to continue and that nobody should ever challenge or disturb it. What Robbie meant by order was that the exploiters of the different nations should confer and work out a fair division of the spoils.”
― Upton Sinclair, O Shepherd, Speak!

“Adolf Hitler had a favorite word, fanaticism, which was hardly ever omitted from any of his speeches, and he had put skilled psychologists and advertising men at work to make certain that the new generations of Germans would never know anything else.”
― Upton Sinclair, O Shepherd, Speak!

“The change will come fast in this country. Both the CIO and the AFL are setting up co-ops for their members, and you can be sure they aren’t going to be non-political. In my old country one in five of the population is a co-op member, and it would never cross the mind of anybody that the co-ops and the Social-Democratic party were anything but the same movement, one in the economic and the other in the political sphere.”
― Upton Sinclair, O Shepherd, Speak!

“Alma was like the Englishmen in Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman who were bored to death in heaven but insisted on staying there because they thought they owed it to their social position.”
― Upton Sinclair, O Shepherd, Speak!

“For a quarter of a century we watched National Socialism stealing our name and using it to cover naked aggression. Few of us are likely to be deceived a second time.”
― Upton Sinclair, O Shepherd, Speak!

“It is a serious thing for us Germans who have been pinning our faith on the Allies. It means concentration camp for us Socialists; the Russians have reopened the former Nazi camps in their zone of Germany and in Poland and are filling them with people of our sort.”
― Upton Sinclair, O Shepherd, Speak!

“Very certainly Franklin Roosevelt would never have been able to launch his New Deal if men such as these had not been sowing the seeds of collectivist thought for a couple of generations. When you met the sowers, and discovered what a variety of seeds they carried, you were better able to understand the confusion and groping of the early New Deal.”
― Upton Sinclair, O Shepherd, Speak!

“Somebody was needed to point out to them that even though they had had to quit, they had not failed entirely. If they had published sound ideas and had found readers, their ideas would live in other minds and spawn and reproduce themselves after the manner of ideas.”
― Upton Sinclair, O Shepherd, Speak!

“What the masses in America read was newspapers and low-priced magazines; also, they listened to the radio and went to the movies. If you wanted mass circulation, those were the ways to get it. They were all enormously expensive and conducted for the profit of private owners; a genuine liberal among the owners was as rare as a white blackbird, and that was why opinion in America lagged so far behind mechanical development—including the aforesaid A-bomb.”
― Upton Sinclair, O Shepherd, Speak!

“Each of the four would have its own idea of what Germany and the Germans ought to be and would proceed to make them over in its image: a Communist East Germany, a Socialist North-central Germany, a Big-Business, Private-Enterprise South-central Germany, and a Bourgeois Southwest Germany, hated, feared, and kept as poor as possible.”
― Upton Sinclair, O Shepherd, Speak!

“Germany was to be divided into four zones, each to be governed by one of the four nations, America, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. To anyone who really wanted peace this arrangement was ominous, for it could mean only that the Big Four distrusted their ability to agree and had agreed upon a series of arguments and squabbles for an indefinite time.”
― Upton Sinclair, O Shepherd, Speak!

“The common people of that land of hope and glory adored their war leader, but they didn’t want him as a peace leader—a distinction that was clear to them but must have been confusing to Winnie. The Labour party obtained a majority of almost two to one; they got it upon the basis of a definite program calling for the nationalization of the five most important of the nation’s industries: coal, steel, transportation, communications, and finance.”
― Upton Sinclair, O Shepherd, Speak!

“A sight never to be forgotten by anyone who was there. The light turned the whole landscape to day; the mountain range near by stood out as if in a dawn of many suns. The light shifted and changed, from golden to red to blue to violet, then to gray; nobody dared look at it without the dark glasses. The cloud continued to rise and boil until it became a tower some eight miles tall; then slowly the light faded out of it, the grumbling ceased, and the wind began to shift it, fortunately away from the Base Camp and with no rain to bring it quickly to earth.”
― Upton Sinclair, O Shepherd, Speak!

“Most of the boys Lanny had played with here, slightly older than himself, had died in Flanders. The sons they had left behind had died in the recent war; but the breed went on—generation after generation born, raised, educated at great expense and trouble, only to be slaughtered on some foreign field.”
― Upton Sinclair, O Shepherd, Speak!

“He knew that armies were being transported from the Mediterranean to the Far East and that the invasion was set for November. Patton had told him that they were reckoning upon a million casualties, more than the British, French, and Americans had sustained in all the European fighting. A terrible prospect indeed, and one that weighed upon the consciences of two idealists dreaming peace on earth and good will toward men.”
― Upton Sinclair, O Shepherd, Speak!

“The small island of Okinawa, close to Japan, had required nearly three months to capture; a hundred and twenty thousand Japanese had been killed or driven to suicide, and only eight thousand captured—which showed the kind of war it was.”
― Upton Sinclair, O Shepherd, Speak!

“Memories did not come in a rush, but little by little; and perhaps that was just as well. She was getting back her interest in life, she was learning to live in this new-old world and be useful in it, much more so than she had been in the past, for she had been a self-centered person, ravenous for pleasure and praise.”
― Upton Sinclair, O Shepherd, Speak!

“Her past life had become a sort of fairy tale, to which she listened gladly and asked questions. After the treatment had continued for two or three weeks she began to exclaim, “I believe I remember that!”
― Upton Sinclair, O Shepherd, Speak!