Dragon Harvest Quotes

“monuments out of millions of human skulls?”
― Upton Sinclair, Dragon Harvest

“When will they stop following leaders who build their monuments out of millions of human skulls?” The son of Budd-Erling was perhaps the least happy man in that famous old church at the moment. He had little admiration for Napoleon Bonaparte, and still less for his Austrian imitator.”
― Upton Sinclair, Dragon Harvest

“They had understood that Paris must be abandoned, so as to save it from destruction. But to surrender, to turn all France over to the boches, to desert Britain and give up the promised aid from America?—c’était la honte, la trahison! Some stood with tears running down their cheeks. Lanny thought, it was as he had said to Kurt, the French body had been separated from the head, and the body was paralyzed.”
― Upton Sinclair, Dragon Harvest

“Only two newspapers now on the kiosks, both humbly subservient—one, Le Matin, and the other, oddly enough, La Victoire! It wouldn’t be many days before the Nazis would revive others—the old names but new policies. Already they had taken over the radio stations, and had set up loudspeakers in the public squares, to tell the French what they were going to think for the next thousand years.”
― Upton Sinclair, Dragon Harvest

“Very soon there would be nobody to challenge the New Order, and France would settle down to life without labor unions, riots, strikes, and all the other appurtenances of democracy.”
― Upton Sinclair, Dragon Harvest

“Lanny was concerned, because one of the Duce’s demands was for Nice, and that might include Cannes and the Cap d’Antibes, Bienvenu and Beauty Budd. But Kurt said: “Do not worry. The jackal only takes what the lion allows him.” Such was a Nazi agent’s opinion of his ally.”
― Upton Sinclair, Dragon Harvest

“This Austrian painter was the Führer’s favorite; he would delight to look upon the weatherbeaten countenance of an old Bauer of the Innthal, where the greatest man in the world had been born. Adi would find in those wrinkled features the honesty, fidelity and credulity which were the virtues he wanted in his peasants, and meant to teach to all the peasants of the earth, not excluding North America.”
― Upton Sinclair, Dragon Harvest

“Semper eadem, always the same, was the motto of their Holy Mother Church, and within the last century her Popes have solemnly repudiated all that charter of liberties upon which the democratic world is being built—freedom of speech, press and worship.”
― Upton Sinclair, Dragon Harvest

“The declaration of Belgian neutrality had been one of Hitler’s great diplomatic successes, very-little appreciated by the outside world. It left France with the northern part of her border exposed; the French armies could enter Belgium only after the German armies had done so, and would thus have no time to prepare positions.”
― Upton Sinclair, Dragon Harvest

“The Italians were tireless in giving assurances to their friends; and every evening you could hear the voice of the American poet, Ezra Pound, speaking in English from a station on the Italian Riviera, ridiculing the idea that the ignorant rabble was fitted to govern any country, and hailing Fascism and its “corporate state” as the form of the future society.”
― Upton Sinclair, Dragon Harvest

“Generalissimo Franco was a soldier, a crusader for Christianity as he conceived it, but he was a poor administrator and no economist; his only conception of government was to kill all the people who did not agree with his ideas, or at least to shut them behind bars and feed them very badly. Carpenters and masons, steelworkers and miners, were dead or dying by the thousands, and did not contribute to the restoration of the shattered cities of Spain.”
― Upton Sinclair, Dragon Harvest

“Such was the “polite” world, in which the conduct of human beings had been rehearsed for centuries, and all actions, all gestures conventionalized and fixed. In such a world, morals tended to become manners, and nobody asked what was going on in your soul, they only asked that you should behave according to their expectations, and not trouble them with your troubles. They didn’t even ask if you meant what you said; on the contrary, they were apt to take it for granted that you didn’t, and that you would be somewhat bête if you did. All the world was a stage, and men and women played exalted and dignified roles upon it; what they were in their hearts, and what they did when they retired to their dressing rooms, were matters upon which you did not intrude.”
― Upton Sinclair, Dragon Harvest

“In a pluto-democracy, politics is the art of outwitting the voters, so the Honorable Ham would never say that he hated the labor unions and proposed to keep them down. What he said was that the Reds were plotting to seize America. Some fifteen years ago he had got himself appointed chairman of a committee to investigate the Communists. His definition of this word was rather vague, and included everybody who proposed any sort of change calculated to reduce the gulf between the rich and the poor.”
― Upton Sinclair, Dragon Harvest

“gentlemen farmers,” meaning that they did no work, were all Republicans, and they put up the funds and maintained a smooth-running political machine.”
― Upton Sinclair, Dragon Harvest

“The Shrine of the Little Flower and its adjoining offices were swarming like a hive of bees, and some editor employed by the fervent Father was taking the mental poison of Josef Goebbels in Berlin, paraphrasing it in the American idiom, and sending it out every week to the half-million readers of Social Justice. When his enemies pointed that out, it didn’t worry the man of God in the least. A strange kaleidoscopic moment of history, when the Nazis had stopped fighting the Communists and the Communists had stopped fighting the Nazis! But Charles Edward Coughlin, whose forefathers had come from Ireland, had one pillar of fire to guide him, one principle which could never fail—whatever hurt the British Empire must be pleasing to God.”
― Upton Sinclair, Dragon Harvest

“Quadratt had, so he claimed, a mailing list of a hundred and fifty thousand names, and seldom a day passed that he didn’t write a speech for some Senator or Congressman to deliver. Then it would be printed as part of the Congressional Record, reprinted at a nominal cost by the Government Printing Office, and mailed out to these names, and to other lists supplied by Nazi or near-Nazi organizations scattered all over the country.”
― Upton Sinclair, Dragon Harvest

“The deal with the Nazis, and the partition of Poland which he now saw going on, troubled his conscience, and he could not keep from voicing his anxiety. This musical pair were going to tour the three million square miles of Bess’s native land and Hansi’s adopted land, arguing about whether the end justifies the means, and what end, and what means, and where are you going to draw the line if you once admit the Jesuit doctrine that it may be necessary to do evil in order that good may result?”
― Upton Sinclair, Dragon Harvest

“It is perfectly possible that what has ever been exists always, and that what is going to be has likewise existed always. So I decided to take a new attitude of mind; I am ready to believe anything if I get enough evidence, and I hesitate before I say that anything is impossible”
― Upton Sinclair, Dragon Harvest

“As Lanny had said to Monck, memory is a mystery, as great a mystery as “spirits” would be if you had decided to believe in them. Skeptics laughed at the idea that the universe, or the air, or whatever, might be full of the souls of uncounted numbers of the dead; where would they stay and what would they do? But these skeptics took it quite as a matter of course that their minds should be full of millions of memories—for the psychologists had proved that you never forgot anything you had once known or that had ever happened to you. Where did these memories stay? In the brain cells, the materialist would reply, and think that he had said something. But how did they stay?”
― Upton Sinclair, Dragon Harvest

“Truth, honor, justice—were these real forces, real “forms” under the relativity theory? These were the questions with which Sir James Jeans and Sir Arthur Eddington were wrestling, and their answers gave Lanny Budd the courage he needed to go on living his lonely secret life.”
― Upton Sinclair, Dragon Harvest

“If mind, will, and conscience guided the universe, a man could believe in right conduct and strive to practice it and make it prevail in the world—even though his individual consciousness might not survive in its present form. But if he was just an accident, a cog in a vast machine that had no purpose, what difference did it make what he did, and what was the use of striving, since he couldn’t affect the result? What is mind? No matter! What is matter? Never mind! Lanny had once heard Adolf Hitler utter what seemed to him the most atheistic sentence ever spoken by man, to the effect that it didn’t matter how spiritual a man might be, his spirituality couldn’t function if his body was beaten to pieces with rubber truncheons. There spoke what Lanny, for lack of a better word, called Satan.”
― Upton Sinclair, Dragon Harvest

“Such was the gospel of “Reverend Smith,” as his followers called him. It was the whole Nazi creed of hate, complete to the smallest detail, but translated from German into Middle Western with a touch of the South. It was preaching in the style of the old-time camp-meeting, where people were used to shouting “Amen!”
― Upton Sinclair, Dragon Harvest

“It was going to be a strictly Christian revolution, but a new kind of Christianity, based exclusively upon hatred of its enemies, and never mentioning love, if it felt any. It was the product of social discontent, the blind revolt of the dispossessed in the presence of wealth in which they had no share or hope of sharing. Ignorance, eldest daughter of poverty, followed in her mother’s train, and this pair of harpies tormented their victims and left them a prey to any demagogue who came their way.”
― Upton Sinclair, Dragon Harvest

“That was the basis of his interest in the Nazis. They had shown how to do it; they had no walking delegates in their shops and no Reds on soapboxes outside their plants; they had law and order, organization and mass-production, the things that Henry lived by and for. So, when friends of Germany came to tell him how it was done, he listened gladly, and when they asked him for jobs he made room for them. He had a grandson of the Kaiser on his staff, and one of his engineers was Fritz Kuhn, founder and head of the German-American Bund. As a result his plants swarmed with Nazis, and so did the city of Detroit and its surrounding towns.”
― Upton Sinclair, Dragon Harvest

“I say that you don’t talk enough to the people. They are deluged with falsehood, in a thousand subtle disguises, and it’s impossible for them to see through all Dr. Goebbels’ tricks. What we are fighting is not just German Nazism and Italian and Spanish Fascism; it’s a worldwide movement and it takes a hundred different forms. It’s all over our own country. It’s privilege and class domination; it’s our big-business newspapers, our giant corporations which are tied up tight with the European cartels. Our people haven’t the slightest idea of all that; their thinking is a hundred years behind the times.”
― Upton Sinclair, Dragon Harvest

“The world had always done its utmost to spoil Lanny Budd, and his conscience gave him no rest about it; the more luxury he enjoyed, the more he hated the system of exploitation on which that luxury was based.”
― Upton Sinclair, Dragon Harvest

“In the long run, every statesman’s acts today are dominated by the dread of social revolution in his own country and those of his neighbors.”
― Upton Sinclair, Dragon Harvest

“They didn’t want to fight Hitler, because they believed that he had found the answer to the peril of labor unionism, which was steadily encroaching upon the privileged classes in every land where industrialism had made advances. Hitler had taught labor its place, and was going to crown his career by exterminating Bolshevism. If he would do that, the British landlords and press-lords and beer and coal and shipping and money lords would be perfectly willing to allow him a big chunk of Europe as his reward.”
― Upton Sinclair, Dragon Harvest

“Eternal Spirit of the chainless Mind! Brightest in dungeons, Liberty! thou art: For there thy habitation is the heart— The heart which love of thee alone can bind; And when thy sons to fetters are consigned— To fetters, and the damp vault’s dayless gloom, Their country conquers with their martyrdom, And Freedom’s fame finds wings on every wind.”
― Upton Sinclair, Dragon Harvest

“He understood that it is the fate of dictators to have to listen to flattery and to grow more susceptible to it. There are few who dare to say No in their presence, and it becomes less and less tolerable to them to hear that presumptuous word.”
― Upton Sinclair, Dragon Harvest