The Return of Lanny Budd Quotes

“We may be tortured by fire, Banished, in mines we may slave, We may be killed without mercy, Always remember, Be brave! Russian rebels had sung this song during the Revolution of 1905. It had been sung by all Russians in 1917 when the Tsar was overthrown, and it had been sung in the early days of Soviet rule; but now it was heard no more—it was too revolutionary! But all Russians knew the melody, and its words were being circulated by the anti-Stalinists among the Soviet troops in Germany.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd

“She did not believe that her mind was shut up in a little bone box called a skull; she believed it was part of the universe. Herbert Spencer had said that a man could no more conceive of God than an oyster could conceive of a man.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd

“It is a product of age-old despotism and terror. It is the way of life where people are suspicious because their lives depend upon it; they are in danger of being poisoned or stabbed every hour. We in the free world cannot understand it, can’t even believe it’.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd

“Colonel Markgraf, who commanded the Red police in East Berlin, was the same officer who had been decorated by Adolf Hitler for his exploits at Stalingrad”
― Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd

“They would tell you a lie and then laugh in your face—not because they thought you believed it but because you were foolish enough not to understand that they were superior to both the truth and you. Because you were foolish enough to believe that there was actually any such thing as truth”
― Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd

“Lanny had been in Poland and East Germany and had talked with refugees from the Baltic provinces and from Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Everywhere it was the same thing: dictatorship called democracy and forced labour called liberty.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd

“It was a regular Nazi technique, and the Soviets have taken it over. Any time they give out reports that Americans have been violating the laws of war, using poison gas, germ warfare, or what have you, you may be sure the Soviets are doing it or getting ready to do it’.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd

“The Bolsheviks would claim that they kept Lenin’s promises, but they didn’t. Lenin promised that the state would wither away, but you see it growing like Jonah’s gourd’. ‘And besides, they killed millions of people’, said the other. ‘We haven’t killed a single one—unless some Tory peer has died of indignation’.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd

“In less than two years more than half the programme had been carried out, and the rest was going to be carried out to the dotting of the last i and the crossing of the last t, and in spite of all the clamour of Tory opposition”
― Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd

“Immediately after the war the Labour party had put forward a programme: the socialisation of five basic industries—coal, electricity, transportation, steel, and the Bank of England. They promised socialised medicine, so that no sick person in Britain need go unattended, and they promised to regulate the prices of food so that no person in Britain need go hungry. They had printed that programme in pamphlet form and seen to its public distribution, and they had swept the elections on that basis.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd

“He was trying to make it easier for me to pretend to be a Red. He explained that both nazism and sovietism are authoritarian governments; the difference is that one is a government by the best, and the other a government by the worst. The Germans are an orderly and systematic people while the Russians are the opposite. But so far as the abstract principles are concerned the two creeds are alike, and therefore it is possible for me to be sympathetic toward the Red theories and to keep my reservations to myself. The Reds are in power, and we have to submit to them and bide our time.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd

“Andreas Hofer, a patriot who defended the freedom of the Tyrol. I remember what he said to his friends: “Wir sind all des Todes Eigen”—“We all belong to death”. We Americans have a story about a Marine sergeant in World War I, leading a charge at Belleau Woods and shouting, “Come on, you sonsabitches—do you want to live forever?”
― Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd

“its recent developments would have staggered Marx. He feared the Tsars as leaders of reaction; he wrote: “The policy of Russia is changeless. Its methods, its tactics, its manoeuvres may change, but the polar star of its policy—world domination—is a fixed star”. Marx lived and worked in England and wrote for the New York Tribune and looked to the Anglo-Saxon people to carry out his theories and set the world free from economic exploitation. Instead it is the men of the Kremlin, the men full of suspicion and fear, the teachers of intrigue and hatred, who are operating in his name and publishing official translations of his works from which most of his expressions concerning Russia and freedom have been cut out.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd

“That is what a courageous and determined man does to those about him; he makes them ashamed to be weak and hesitant; he makes himself an example, a slogan, a call to duty.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd

“It is a difficult thing to change one’s mind, and many people are unable to achieve the feat. It is a truly agonising thing to love somebody and then through a long period of time to watch that loved one’s character deteriorating and turning into something you have to despise, even to fear. And if that is true with one person, how much more must it be true with a whole nation, a social system, a dream of social justice and of peace and good will on earth!”
― Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd

“You would be willing to die to teach men to love one another, and the Communists are willing to die in order to teach men to hate you. In the process they are willing to tell any lies, and they employ the most highly skilled psychologists to invent the lies which are most plausible and most harmful. It was Hitler who said that the bigger the lie the easier to get it believed; it was Mussolini who taught Hitler that maxim, and it was from the Bolsheviks that Mussolini learned it’.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd

“The capitalists are automatically driven by the forces of an expanding economy to reach out to every corner of the earth for raw materials and markets. We take these by purchase where possible, but where we encounter resistance we are ready to use force. By this means we reduce all colonial peoples to the status of peons and we keep them there. But now come the heroic Bolsheviks, the followers of the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist line, calling upon the awakening proletariat to arise and expropriate the expropriators”
― Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd

“Whenever we get a speaker who takes the fellow-traveller line, get another speaker who takes the opposite line to answer him. For example, let’s get John Dewey to answer Philips; there’s another nice old man, but one who is clear-sighted and knows a fact when it jumps up and hits him on the head’.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd

“I’m not calling for war; on the contrary, I think the only hope of preventing war is for us to rearm and do it quickly, to convince Stalin that he cannot take the rest of the world without war. I’m quite sure he doesn’t want war, because he has had a demonstration of what American industrial power can do, and he has seen what the atomic bombs have done in Japan’.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd

“Vishinsky says that we are dangling the atomic bomb as a sword of Damocles over his head, and that is exactly what we are doing; if we didn’t have it and didn’t dangle it the Red armies would be moving across France today and showering London with a new stock of the V-2 rockets, which the top German scientists are now teaching the Reds to manufacture. It wouldn’t be six months more before Stalin would be in Madrid, sitting on the severed head of Franco and thumbing his nose at us’.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd

“I went to Yalta with Roosevelt, and I met Stalin and saw him make a bargain and pledge his solemn word. He was given everything he asked for—even things that we had no right to give. He made fools of us; Roosevelt knew it before he died and told me so.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd

“The problem was to get the German workers to vote for democracy as it was understood in America: that was to say, capitalism in industry and democracy only in government”
― Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd

“They hardly know what to make of the idea of hearing both sides; it contradicts the basic principle of their training—to believe that what they are told must be true. The Americans and British have the better case, but the Reds are more expert in presenting theirs. They are tireless propagandists; they have nothing else to do but to spread the faith.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd

“Perhaps the day will come when you will repeat the experience of the old prophet. “Then said I, Ah, Lord God! surely thou hast greatly deceived this people and Jerusalem, saying, Ye shall have peace; whereas the sword reacheth unto the soul”.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd

“He bides his time, and when the time comes he pounces. He makes promises, but they don’t mean a thing—except that the time for the pounce hasn’t yet come.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd

“Stalin’s Marxism and the National and Colonial Question. That book is the bible for every Russian diplomat and representative abroad. In it Stalin deals with every country of any importance, and he analyses the conditions in that country; he has all the facts and is clear and precise about what he is going to do and how he is going to do it—to undermine the government of that country and place his own kind of people in control.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd

“If the working people in Germany were to get hold of industry and make a success of running it, what excuse could you find to keep the workers of America from wanting to try the same thing?”
― Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd

“It had been possible for workers to be free so long as industry was primitive and tools were few and simple; but when the tools had become billion-dollar corporations, there could no longer be true freedom for the workers until those tools were socially owned and democratically managed. But you would have a hard time telling that to any American who knew that his country was the richest and most productive in the world, and who read in his newspaper every day that this was due solely to the fact that the tools of production were privately owned and managed”
― Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd

“Currency inflation is to the government what as anesthetic is to the surgeon; it provides an easy and painless way of separating the rich from their savings and reducing the wages of all employed persons in the community.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd

“Lanny Budd talked with officials, both military and civilian, about the curious Soviet practice of telling the most barefaced and obvious lies and maintaining them in spite of any facts offered in rebuttal. Was it an assertion of their ego, that truth was whatever they chose to make it? Was it a consequence of their denial of the existence of any moral law? Or was it just an expression of their contempt for their opponents? They would tell you a lie and then laugh in your face—not because they thought you believed it but because you were foolish enough not to understand that they were superior to both the truth and you. Because you were foolish enough to believe that there was actually any such thing as truth in the world! Because you were inferiors, doomed to early extinction, and it didn’t matter in the least what you believed about anything! That was really the way they felt, and lying to you was part of the process of your extermination. They, the new master class, the future possessors and rulers of the world, yielded to nothing—not even the truth!”
― Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd