One Clear Call Quotes

“The polls were still open, and Lanny stopped across the street and watched for a few minutes. There was an American flag on a staff before the old white frame town hall, the polling place, and a few people waiting in line—but no loitering, and no electioneering within a specified distance of the sacred spot. He had seen people fighting one another on so many parts of the earth’s surface, and how he longed to teach them this dignified and orderly way of settling their problems.”
― Upton Sinclair, One Clear Call

“The city was a parasite upon the farm; the bourgeois slept late and wore fine clothes and did no real work, but charged the peasant high prices for tools and clothing and all the things he had to have.”
― Upton Sinclair, One Clear Call

“The French word for underbrush, maquis, had come to be the name for the men who hid in it and came out to carry on sabotage against the enemy. “Monsieur,” said Baritone, “we have the enemy’s own figures that more than forty thousand Frenchmen have been executed during the occupation, and a hundred thousand are in concentration camps in Germany. This in addition to the quarter million who have been deported.”
― Upton Sinclair, One Clear Call

“Lanny identified him with Montmartre and imagined a bow tie and a beret, except that he knew the Nazis had banned the wearing of berets, which was classified among “demonstrations harmful to the state.”
― Upton Sinclair, One Clear Call

“The plane was tiny; it had to be, because, as the pilot said, it must be able to come down on a half dollar. It flew as low as possible in order to escape detection by enemy radar. To be sure, that made a danger of church steeples and tall trees in the darkness; but then, as Frederick the Great had said to his troops, “Do you want to live forever?”
― Upton Sinclair, One Clear Call

“Wages had gone up slightly—from fifty cents per day; this being another Catholic land, where birth control was banned or unknown, the population pressed inexorably upon the limits of subsistence. The well-to-do had the poor always with them and found it most convenient, because one could always get servants”
― Upton Sinclair, One Clear Call

“That appeared to be the way of all evil, it compelled the good to cease being good and to meet evil on its own evil ground.”
― Upton Sinclair, One Clear Call

“This was the sort of government the American Army wanted in order to win the war quickly, and it was the sort they would want after the war, with no nonsense from reformers and crackpots. The big businessmen were those who got things done; they were the men the big brass dealt with in Washington, and whom they understood and liked.”
― Upton Sinclair, One Clear Call

“The man in the middle gets the bullets from both directions; but I suppose we have to take our stand there all the same.”
― Upton Sinclair, One Clear Call

“There were some who talked about saving their money and retiring to do something worthwhile, but few indeed were able to achieve this, for the pressure to spend money like your friends and associates was irresistible.”
― Upton Sinclair, One Clear Call

“They were told about the house, which had been designed by the man whom advanced and art-loving Americans considered the greatest architect of the time; the roof was so built that water didn’t always run off it, and the chimneys smoked, and the kitchen was inconveniently placed—but it was one of the most original and beautiful of designs, and everybody wanted to come and see it.”
― Upton Sinclair, One Clear Call

“That was the irony of the free enterprise system, so ardently praised by the enterprisers; the system could keep the people in comfort so long as the energies of the community were being devoted to killing other people; but the moment they settled down to enjoy the peace their valor had won, they found themselves heading into another depression, with breadlines and apple-selling on the streets and boondoggling and leaf-raking on the country roads.”
― Upton Sinclair, One Clear Call

“Armies marching and fighting all over Europe, all through the centuries—and Lanny could not recall ever having met a single peasant or workingman who liked war or expected to gain from it. War was a sport of ruling classes!”
― Upton Sinclair, One Clear Call

“The art of painting is one of the greatest of human inventions, a cultural instrument, a gateway to all other arts and branches of knowledge. When you have a collection of great paintings before your eyes, you can think of history, you can watch the pageant of the ages passing before your eyes. You can think of the poems and stories you have read, the legends, the traditions. You can think of religion, broaden your understanding of it, and learn that fundamentally all worship is one. You can travel in imagination and see the world without any of the discomforts and dangers of travel. You can enjoy the distilled essence of the beauties of nature. You can behold the works of man, “and manners, climates, councils, governments.” You can study architecture, costumes, interior decoration, and, above all peoples of all races and climes. You can study psychology in the faces of the proud monarch and the humble toilworn peasant; the great painter has read their secrets and told you more about them than they themselves knew.”
― Upton Sinclair, One Clear Call

“The great indoctrinated masses loved and honored him as a projection, a perfect archetype, of themselves. Amid all the suffering and grief they believed what he told them, that they were the greatest people on earth, and had only to hold out and victory would come to their banner. Sieg heil!”
― Upton Sinclair, One Clear Call

“It is the nature of despotism all over the world that no man can trust any other, or be sure of the meaning of any spoken word.”
― Upton Sinclair, One Clear Call

“Both of this pair were agreed that war could never be abolished while the present economic system endured. Capitalism was war carried on like a game, under a set of rules and conventions, but its end was the same, the taking away from the other person of the means of life. Capitalism was a game of “freeze-out” poker; when you had lost all your chips, you were out of the game for good. Commercial competition inevitably tended to monopoly, and monopoly froze out whole classes and whole nations from their chance of life.”
― Upton Sinclair, One Clear Call

“What chance does the democratic tradition stand when its enemies control ninety per cent of the press and the radio and the money—plus all of the weapons? I tell you, the fellows who run the National Association of Manufacturers could take over the government of this country in twenty-four hours if ever they get mad enough to try it. And believe me, they’re going to get madder every hour in the economic crisis that will come after this war.”
― Upton Sinclair, One Clear Call

“But wait till the war’s over, and the countries of Europe vote Red or Pink, as they’re sure to do, and the Boss stands by them, as I know he will. Then you’ll see these big fellows foaming at the mouth, and that’s the time they will act. We’ll discover then that American Fascism is more deadly than either Italian or German, because our masters have more money, and believe more in money power, and are more used to having their own way in all things.”
― Upton Sinclair, One Clear Call

“For ten years Adi Schicklgruber had been living in a court; which meant that he had surrounded himself with persons who would tell him what he wanted to hear and nothing else. It was surely not up to Lanny to change that regimen.”
― Upton Sinclair, One Clear Call

“Such was their dream of happiness for this world; and for the next, you prayed to the Blessed Virgin, went to mass two or three times a year, and left everything else to the Higher Powers.”
― Upton Sinclair, One Clear Call

“He had a great variety of invocations and expletives, and two modes of speech, or dialects, one of which he employed in the presence of men and the other in what was called mixed company. Lanny had been about the world enough to know that this was supposed to be the way of a “he man,” and he thought it rather silly.”
― Upton Sinclair, One Clear Call

“in the next dark place a camel harnessed to a pole went round and round, working a press which squeezed olive oil from loads of the fruit; the camel had a hood over his face, so that he wouldn’t see what he was doing, and might dream that he was out on the desert trails where he had been born.”
― Upton Sinclair, One Clear Call

“Even the Catholics, the most devout among them who wore scapulars and said their prayers, were strongly tinged with Pink. They would cite the encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII dealing with the rights of labor and the evils of inequality of wealth—those same authoritative documents which F.D.R. kept on his desk to read to archbishops who came to protest against this or that New Deal extremism.”
― Upton Sinclair, One Clear Call

“America’s leading newspaper proprietors, Mr. Hearst and Colonel McCormick, Cissy Patterson and Frank Gannett, were loyal friends of Nazi-Fascism, operating under democratic disguise. Their tens of millions of readers were by now thoroughly indoctrinated, and the mothers of America wanted nothing but to get their sons out of this world holocaust.”
― Upton Sinclair, One Clear Call

“onetime circus barker who had become senator from North Carolina and was one of the most ardent propagandists of that brand of hundred-per cent Americanism which could hardly be distinguished from Nazi-Fascism.”
― Upton Sinclair, One Clear Call