King Coal Quotes

“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, King Coal

“It lives and breathes in the light, because it has thousands of unfortunates toiling in the darkness. It lives and has its being in proud liberty because thousands are slaving for it, whose thraldom is the price of this liberty. This”
― Upton Sinclair, King Coal

“He would help a little, he said; in his mind he was figuring how much he ought to do. How far shall a man go in relieving the starvation about him, before he can enjoy his meals in a well-appointed club? What casuist will work out this problem—telling him the percentage he shall relieve of the starvation he happens personally to know about, the percentage of that which he sees on the streets, the percentage of that about which he reads in government reports on the rise in the cost of living. To what extent is he permitted to close his eyes, as he walks along the streets on his way to the club? To what extent is he permitted to avoid reading government reports before going out to dinner-dances with his fiancée? Problems such as these the masters of the higher mathematics have neglected to solve; the wise men of the academies and the holy men of the churches have likewise failed to work out the formulas;”
― Upton Sinclair, King Coal: A Novel

“The business of a coal-operator was to buy his labour cheap, to turn out the maximum product in the shortest time, and to sell the product at the market price to parties whose credit was satisfactory. If a concern was doing that, it was a successful concern; for any one to mention that it was making wrecks of the people who dug the coal, was to be guilty of sentimentality and impertinence.”
― Upton Sinclair, King Coal: A Novel

“Yes, this little mine chap was a cherub, now; but how about when he grew big? He would grow ugly and coarse-looking, in ten years one would not know him from any other of the rough and dirty men of the village. Jessie took the fact that common people grow ugly as they mature as a proof that they are, in some deep and permanent way, the inferiors of those above them.”
― Upton Sinclair, King Coal: A Novel

“Once he had lived in this world and taken it as a matter of course. He had known these people, gone about with them; they had seemed friendly, obliging, a good sort of people on the whole. And now, what a change! They seemed no longer friendly! Was the change in them? Or was it Hal who had become cynical—so that he saw them in this terrifying new light, cold, and unconcerned as the stars about men who were dying a few miles away!”
― Upton Sinclair, King Coal: A Novel

“Hal told what so many had come to believe—that the company was saving property at the expense of life.”
― Upton Sinclair, King Coal: A Novel

“Private Ownership of coal-mines! Private Ownership of sealed-up entrances and non-existent escape-ways! Private Ownership of fans which did not start, of sprinklers which did not sprinkle. Private Ownership of clubs and revolvers, and of thugs and ex-convicts to use them, driving away rescuers and shutting up agonised widows and orphans in their homes! Oh, the serene and well-fed priests of Private Ownership, chanting in academic halls the praises of the bloody Demon!”
― Upton Sinclair, King Coal: A Novel

“Eternal spirit of the chainless mind,” says Byron. “Greatest in dungeons Liberty thou art!” The poet goes on to add that “When thy sons to fetters are confined—” then “Freedom’s fame finds wings on every wind.”
― Upton Sinclair, King Coal: A Novel

“But even while he asked the question, Hal was realising that Mary was right. His was the attitude of the leisure-class person, used to having his own way;”
― Upton Sinclair, King Coal: A Novel

“People don’t realise that idea—that men have to be organised to get their legal rights.”
― Upton Sinclair, King Coal: A Novel

“But how will you get the law enforced, except by a union? No individual man can do it—it’s ‘down the canyon’ with him if he mentions the law.”
― Upton Sinclair, King Coal: A Novel

“We’ve had laws passed, a whole raft of laws about coal-mining—the eight-hour law, the anti-scrip law, the company-store law, the mine-sprinkling law, the check-weighman law. What difference has it made in North Valley that there are such laws on the statute-books? Would you ever even know about them?”
― Upton Sinclair, King Coal: A Novel

“Why, you can’t even get naturalisation papers, unless you’re a company man; they won’t register you, unless the boss gives you an O. K.”
― Upton Sinclair, King Coal: A Novel

“Yes, that seems to be their attitude. That’s the rule they apply to all the world—if anything goes wrong with you, it must be your own fault. It’s a land of equal opportunity.” “And you’ll notice,” said the organiser, “that the more privileges people have had, the more boldly they talk that way.”
― Upton Sinclair, King Coal: A Novel

“this rock must be hewed away before the miner could get at the coal. All such work was called “dead-work,” and it was the cause of unceasing war. In the old days the company had paid extra for it; now, since they had got the upper hand of the men, they were refusing to pay.”
― Upton Sinclair, King Coal: A Novel

“Somewhere at the head of the great dividend-paying machine that was called the General Fuel Company must be some devilish intelligence that had worked it all out, that had given the orders to its ecclesiastical staff: “We want the present—we leave you the future! We want the bodies—we leave you the souls! Teach them what you will about heaven—so long as you let us plunder them on earth!”
― Upton Sinclair, King Coal: A Novel

“They gathered a population of humble serfs, selected from twenty or thirty races of hereditary bondsmen; but owing to the absurd American custom of having public-schools, the children of this population learned to speak English, and even to read it. So they became too good for their lot in life;”
― Upton Sinclair, King Coal: A Novel

“He began to ask, timidly, what Hal thought he could do if he were to run away from his family and try his luck in the world outside. Hal, striving to remember where he had seen olive-skinned Greeks with big black eyes in this beautiful land of the free, could hold out no better prospect than a shoe-shining parlour, or the wiping out of wash-bowls in a hotel-lavatory, handing over the tips to a fat padrone.”
― Upton Sinclair, King Coal: A Novel

“10. Hal was coming to know these people; to see them no longer as a mass, to be despised or pitied in bulk, but as individuals, with individual temperaments and problems, exactly like people in the world of the sunlight”
― Upton Sinclair, King Coal: A Novel

“Thus, as always, when one understood the lives of men, one came to pity instead of despising. Here was a separate race of creatures, subterranean, gnomes, pent up by society for purposes of its own.”
― Upton Sinclair, King Coal: A Novel

“The vein varied from four to five feet in thickness; a cruelty of nature which made it necessary that the men at the “working face”—the place where new coal was being cut—should learn to shorten their stature”
― Upton Sinclair, King Coal: A Novel

“another small one-room building which served as a church; the clergyman belonging to the General Fuel Company denomination. He was given the use of the building, by way of start over the saloons, which had to pay a heavy rental to the company; it seemed a proof of the innate perversity of human nature that even in spite of this advantage, heaven was losing out in the struggle against hell in the coal-camp.”
― Upton Sinclair, King Coal: A Novel

“When you’ve had a job for a while, you’ll know that the law in a coal-camp is what your boss tells you.” The hobo went on to register his conviction that when one man has the giving of jobs, and other men have to scramble for them, the law would never have much to say in the deal. Hal judged this a profound observation, and wished that it might be communicated to the professor of political economy at Harrigan.”
― Upton Sinclair, King Coal: A Novel