Jack London Quotes

“In London the slaughter of the innocents goes on on a scale more stupendous than any before in the history of the world.  And equally stupendous is the callousness of the people who believe in Christ, acknowledge God, and go to church regularly on Sunday.  For the rest of the week they riot about on the rents and profits which come to them from the East End stained with the blood of the children.  Also, at times, so peculiarly are they made, they will take half a million of these rents and profits and send it away to educate the black boys of the Soudan.”
― Jack London, Complete Works of Jack London

“Hare-Lip sniffed and sneered and Hoo-Hoo snickered, until Edwin nudged them to be silent.”
― Jack London, Jack London: The Complete Novels Book

“Youth which lives by hope is riven by unrest.”
― Jack London, Jack London: The Complete Novels

“The Church does not protest against it,” Ernest replied. “And in so far as the Church does not protest, it condones, for remember the Church is supported by the capitalist class.”
― Jack London, Complete Works of Jack London

“With the aurora borealis flaming coldly overhead, or the stars leaping in the frost dance, and the land numb and frozen under its pall of snow, this song of the huskies might have been the defiance of life, only it was pitched in minor key, with long-drawn wailings and half-sobs, and was more the pleading of life, the articulate travail of existence. It was an old song, old as the breed itself — one of the first songs of the younger world in a day when songs were sad. It was invested with the woe of unnumbered generations, this plaint by which Buck was so strangely stirred. When he moaned and sobbed, it was with the pain of living that was of old the pain of his wild fathers, and the fear and mystery of the cold and dark that was to them fear and mystery. And that he should be stirred by it marked the completeness with which he harked back through the ages of fire and roof to the raw beginnings of life in the howling ages.”
― Jack London, Jack London: The Complete Novels

“It was all well enough in the Southland, under the law of love and fellowship, to respect private property and personal feelings; but in the Northland, under the law of club and fang, whoso took such things into account was a fool, and in so far as he observed them he would fail to prosper.”
― Jack London, Jack London: The Complete Novels

“Steward, Daughtry. Mr. Daughtry, friend, sir, or whatever I may name you, this is no fairy-story of the open boat, the cross-bearings unnamable, and the treasure a fathom under the sand. This is real. I have a heart. That, sir”—here he waved his extended hand under Daughtry’s nose—“is my hand. There is only one thing you may do, must do, right now. You must take that hand in your hand, and shake it, with your heart in your hand as mine is in my hand.”
― Jack London, The Collected Works of Jack London: The Complete Works PergamonMedia

“Lobby—a peculiar institution for bribing, bulldozing, and corrupting the legislators who were supposed to represent the people's interests.”
― Jack London, Jack London: The Collected Works

“When you reach out your vaunted strong hands for our palaces and purpled ease, we will show you what strength is. In roar of shell and shrapnel and in whine of machine-guns will our answer be couched.* We will grind you revolutionists down under our heel, and we shall walk upon your faces. The world is ours, we are its lords, and ours it shall remain. As for the host of labor, it has been in the dirt since history began, and I read history aright. And in the dirt it shall remain so long as I and mine and those that come after us have the power. There is the word. It is the king of words—Power. Not God, not Mammon, but Power.”
― Jack London, Jack London: The Collected Works

“In face of the facts that modern man lives more wretchedly than the cave-man, and that his producing power is a thousand times greater than that of the cave-man, no other conclusion is possible than that the capitalist class has mismanaged, that you have mismanaged, my masters, that you have criminally and selfishly mismanaged.”
― Jack London, Jack London: The Collected Works

“Maria was amazed to learn that he had been in the Azores, where she had lived until she was eleven. She was doubly amazed that he had been in the Hawaiian Islands, whither she had migrated from the Azores with her people.”
― Jack London, Jack London: The Collected Works

“He paid two dollars and a half a month rent for the small room he got from his Portuguese landlady, Maria Silva, a virago and a widow, hard working and harsher tempered, rearing her large brood of children somehow, and drowning her sorrow and fatigue at irregular intervals in a gallon of the thin, sour wine that she bought from the corner grocery and saloon for fifteen cents. From detesting her and her foul tongue at first, Martin grew to admire her as he observed the brave fight she made.”
― Jack London, Jack London: The Collected Works

“In dim ways he recognised in man the animal that had fought itself to primacy over the other animals of the Wild.”
― Jack London, Jack London: The Collected Works

“you don’t know the game of buying brains. I do. That’s my specialty. I’m going to make money out of them,”
― Jack London, Jack London: The Complete Novels

“He was never disturbed over why a thing happened.  How it happened was sufficient for him. ”
― Jack London, The Collected Works of Jack London: The Complete Works PergamonMedia

“He had a method of accepting things, without questioning the why and wherefore. ”
― Jack London, The Collected Works of Jack London: The Complete Works PergamonMedia

“for he could scarcely make them move together to grip a twig, and they seemed remote from his body and from him. ”
― Jack London, The Collected Works of Jack London: The Complete Works PergamonMedia

“Old longings nomadic leap, Chafing at custom's chain; Again from its brumal sleep Wakens the ferine strain.”
― Jack London, The Complete Novels of Jack London

“But the man dreaming greatly and pressed by sordid necessity, he is the man who must confront the absolute contradiction. He is the man who cannot pour his artist-soul into his work and exchange that work for bread and meat. The world is strangely and coldly averse to his exchanging the joy of his heart for the solace of his stomach. And to him is it given to discover that what the world prizes most it demands least, and that what it clamors the loudest after it does not prize at all.”
― Jack London, Complete Works of Jack London

“testimony,”
― Jack London, Jack London: The Complete Novels

“consciousness”
― Jack London, The Jack London Collection

“potency of motion,”
― Jack London, Jack London: The Complete Novels

“They may not know it, but it is a pose. In so far as they cultivate salient peculiarities, they cultivate falseness to themselves and live lies.”
― Jack London, Complete Works of Jack London

“That is new-womanish talk,” he frowned. “Equal rights, the ballot, and all that.”
― Jack London, Complete Works of Jack London

“I’ve — well, I’ve been down in the Pit,” Joe succeeded in blurting out. “I must confess that you look like it — very much like it indeed.” Mr. Bronson spoke severely, but if ever by great effort he conquered a smile, that was the time. “I presume,” he went on, “that you do not refer to the abiding-place of sinners, but rather to some definite locality in San Francisco. Am I right?”
― Jack London, Complete Works of Jack London

“mouths”
― Jack London, The Complete Novels

“It was the very essence of the unknown; it was the sum of the terrors of the unknown, the one culminating and unthinkable catastrophe that could happen to him, about which he knew nothing and about which he feared everything.”
― Jack London, Jack London: The Complete Novels

“The boss had all but agreed to take him on for some sort of unskilled labor, when, struck by the cadaverous look of the man, he told him to bare his arm. Up went the sleeve of his coat and his ragged flannel shirt, exposing a naked arm with the muscles nearly gone, and the blue-white transparent skin stretched over sinews and the outlines of the bones. Pitiful beyond words was his effort to give a semblance of strength to the biceps which rose faintly to the upward movement of the forearm. But the boss sent him off with an oath and a contemptuous laugh; and I watched the fellow as he turned down the street, facing the fact of his starving family with a despair at his heart which only mortal man can feel and no mortal tongue can speak.”
― Jack London, The Collected Works of Jack London: The Complete Works PergamonMedia

“The Complete Novels of Jack London”
― Jack London, The Complete Novels of Jack London

“If you don’t, then I shall not depart from this place. I shall remain here, die here. I know you are a leper. You can’t tell me anything about that. There’s my hand. Are you going to take it? My heart is there in the palm of it, in the pulse in every finger-end of it. If you don’t take it, I warn you I’ll sit right down here in this chair and die. I want you to understand I am a man, sir, a gentleman. I am a friend, a comrade. I am no poltroon of the flesh. I live in my heart and in my head, sir—not in this feeble carcass I cursorily inhabit. Take that hand. I want to talk with you afterward.”
― Jack London, The Collected Works of Jack London: The Complete Works PergamonMedia