Presidential Mission Quotes

“It took no special gift of seership to foresee what was coming to the postwar world. There would be three great powers, the Communist, headed by the Soviet Union, the capitalist, headed by America, and the democratic Socialist, hoped for in Britain, France, and the Scandinavian lands. Laurel said: “We Socialists will be out in No Man’s Land, under the fire of both extremists; it will be our task to teach the Russians that democracy in industry is nothing without democracy in politics, and to teach the Americans that democracy in politics is nothing without democracy in industry.”
― Upton Sinclair, Presidential Mission

“In spite of the food shortages the British people were living better than ever in their lives before, the reason being that what there was got distributed more fairly.”
― Upton Sinclair, Presidential Mission

“Where savage beasts in forest midnight roam, Seeking in sorrow for each other’s joy. Even while he was helping to win a war, Lanny hated that war and all others; he hated the lies he had to tell fully as much as those he had to hear. He was a man with a divided mind, and this put him at a disadvantage with men like these Nazis, who were never troubled with doubts and had consigned all scruples to the dustbin of history.”
― Upton Sinclair, Presidential Mission

“Lanny Budd was the son and grandson and great-grandson of merchants of death; he had been born and reared and educated on money made by the manufacture and sale of instruments of death; he was flying now in a warplane, upon an errand of war, even though he persuaded himself, as men do, that it was one of peace. He asked himself whether man was doomed because he could not deliver himself from the curse of war.”
― Upton Sinclair, Presidential Mission

“he didn’t want to talk about his own troubles, but about the thousands of captives in that desert hellhole called Bou Arfa. Raoul was one of the most selfless men that Lanny had ever known, and no amount of injustice had ever been enough to make him cynical; he said that the worst shock of his life had been the discovery that the Americans didn’t care enough about their friends here in North Africa to protect them against the scoundrels and traitors who had been shooting at American soldiers less than three months ago. Persons who had risked their lives to help in the landings had been picked up on the streets of Algiers by the pro-Vichy police agents and shipped off to be half baked by day and half frozen by night in the Sahara desert. And not a voice raised in protest, not a chance of any help for such victims!”
― Upton Sinclair, Presidential Mission

“four divisions of magnificent paratroopers were dead in the snows of Russia or prisoners in Russian labor camps. Their Führer had just proclaimed three days of mourning for the three hundred thousand heroes who had been cut to pieces in front of Stalingrad—after he had forbidden them to surrender.”
― Upton Sinclair, Presidential Mission

“You know the old doctrine that the end justifies the means. I was reading some modern philosopher the other day and noted the statement that it is the means that determine the end.”
― Upton Sinclair, Presidential Mission

“Millions of ideas, constantly changing and shifting, drifting into consciousness and out again, and all supposedly at random, with no “soul” to direct them! No purpose, no goal, though every materialist was a living determination to destroy the idea of a soul, and of a God who had anything to do with a purely accidental universe! What a strange accident, that men should labor so purposefully to destroy the idea of purpose!”
― Upton Sinclair, Presidential Mission

“Tis well that such seditious songs are sung Only by priests, and in the Latin tongue!”
― Upton Sinclair, Presidential Mission

“Never by chance will you say anything about there being starvation outside the gates; and if the owner takes you to the Episcopal Church or the Catholic, you will not quote what you hear about laying up for yourselves treasures on earth, or about how “the Lord hath put down the mighty from their seats and exalted them of low degree. He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.”
― Upton Sinclair, Presidential Mission

“The consequences of the deal with the Darlan-Noguès outfit were the same here as in Algiers; perhaps even a little worse, because of General Patton, himself a reactionary martinet. The deal had saved many American lives, but it imperiled American principles and exposed American officers to temptations against which they had no weapons.”
― Upton Sinclair, Presidential Mission

“They went down and saw the crowds welcoming the landing parties with wild cheering. This was the phenomenon which so greatly puzzled the G.I.’s; first they were killed and then they were cheered. The G.I.’s had been well trained in shooting, but nobody had troubled to explain to them the class struggle which existed in France; how the great mass of the people wanted peace and bread, while the higher officers of Army and Navy wanted la gloire and l’honneur.”
― Upton Sinclair, Presidential Mission

“That was the sort of reassurance a French authoritarian would value, and when Lanny perceived that his bait was being taken he went on to sing the praises of America as the classic land of big business, where every worker had been persuaded that he was soon to become a capitalist, or that, at the least, his children would.”
― Upton Sinclair, Presidential Mission

“Portugal was making money out of both sides in the war, and, as always, the rich were adding to their hoards while the poor discovered the meaning of inflation and that wages never kept up with the stealthy increase in the cost of food.”
― Upton Sinclair, Presidential Mission

“He didn’t believe in the system of monopoly capitalism any more than Lanny did, and he didn’t care if his system of relief by public spending brought the profiteers nearer to their doom. He had been quoted as saying about the program of the New Deal: “We shall spend and spend, and tax and tax, and elect and elect.”
― Upton Sinclair, Presidential Mission

“Emperor Trajan he read an inscription from those same ancient days and in that same spirit: “To hunt, to bathe, to play, to laugh, that is to live.”
― Upton Sinclair, Presidential Mission

“They had let these officials into their companies, and thus obtained permission to ship their wealth to their banks in North Africa. Lanny heard about it from one source after another, and some said that ten billion francs had come to Algiers, and others said twenty billion, and all agreed that it was still coming.”
― Upton Sinclair, Presidential Mission

“The great cartels, in America called “trusts,” were international in ownership and operation, and so were the banks which co-operated with them. The Comité des Forges, a union of the steel and munitions makers of France, used ore from Lorraine, which was French, and coal from the Ruhr, which was German. The French and Germans who owned these vast interests wanted nothing but to make goods and sell them at prices which they fixed in secret with the steel makers of Britain and America. They didn’t want to fight each other, they wanted to save their own property from the general wreck.”
― Upton Sinclair, Presidential Mission

“There, as in France, politicians wanted one thing and businessmen wanted another, and the latter had to pay, but they managed to get back still more. Businessmen knew that wars came and went, but business continued, and its interests were permanent”
― Upton Sinclair, Presidential Mission

“the principal raw material from which Huiles Lesieur derived its products was the peanut crop of French West Africa.”
― Upton Sinclair, Presidential Mission

“Among the guests had been M. Jacques Lemaigre-Dubreuil, an ardent collaborationist and one of the most active businessmen of the country. He was a director of the Banque de France, he published the reactionary newspaper Le Jour, and his wife was the heiress of Huiles Lesieur, the great vegetable-oil trust. More important yet, he was organizer and head of the most powerful pressure group in France, the League of Taxpayers, which was something like the National Association of Manufacturers in the United States, at once a propaganda and a “slush-fund” group for turning the heat on politicians and legislators to make sure that they did what the “two hundred families” wanted.”
― Upton Sinclair, Presidential Mission

“He knew how to make himself agreeable, and it wasn’t many days before he was in the châteaux and elaborate villas which the plutocracy of Algiers maintained in private parks on the hill slopes surrounding the city. He was not surprised to find these people pro-Fascist in sentiment. It had been his observation that all colonial peoples are conservative, even reactionary. In Hongkong he had found the English more Tory than all but a small handful of diehards in London, and now he found the businessmen of French North Africa asking nothing but to be let alone. They were doing a brisk trade with the Germans; everything they could lay hands on was in demand at the highest prices ever known. It didn’t take a P.A. many days to realize that these merchants were not going to hold out welcoming arms to an invading army of democracy.”
― Upton Sinclair, Presidential Mission

“For Lanny’s then stepfather had been not merely a painter, but a student and thinker. When he painted the ancient ruins of Greece and Rome he tried to make you feel the sorrow of great things vanished forever. When he painted a Greek shepherd in his rags or a Biskra water carrier in his gray burnoose, Marcel was not just getting something exotic and unusual; he had a heart full of pity for lonely men who lived hard lives and did not understand the forces which dominated them.”
― Upton Sinclair, Presidential Mission

“the government of the country was conservative and, like all such governments, found it easier to get along with well-heeled and well-dressed Fascists than with ex-labor leaders and agitators, refugees who generally were destitute and frequently had jail records. This is something which applies to nearly all governments;”
― Upton Sinclair, Presidential Mission

“What are we, really; and how do we come to be, and for what purpose are we placed here, and what becomes of us when we depart? Above all, what is the origin of that strange faculty in us which we call conscience? Why do we have a sense of duty, and what is the basis of its validity, and of our assurance concerning it? If we are as the beasts of the field that perish, why do we owe any obligation to the world, or to our fellow men, or to ourselves?”
― Upton Sinclair, Presidential Mission

“Charlot’s eyes lighted up with fanatical fervor as he told about it; at last they were going to put down the labor unions and their revolutionary propaganda, and make sure that the traditional France would survive and dominate Western Europe. Lanny found the German Nazis strange and terrible people, but he found even more fantastic these Fascists of the Spanish and French Catholic pattern, who were building this machinery of repression in the name of Jesus Christ.”
― Upton Sinclair, Presidential Mission

“No, there had to be a new set of ideas to account for this creature, which, during a period of nine months, had been repeating the history of life on this planet over a period of many millions of years. It had consciousness, and had—or was—what people called a “soul.” It would”
― Upton Sinclair, Presidential Mission