Wide Is the Gate Quotes

“What we have to do is to judge which side stands for freedom and enlightenment and which for medievalism and superstition.”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“Dreadful, unspeakably wicked men the Nazi chieftains were, and Lanny was haunted by the idea that it was his duty to give up all pleasures and all other duties and try to awaken the people of Western Europe to a realization of the peril in which they stood.”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“Indoctus pauperiem pati!”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“The ascetics give it a bad name,” he said, “but the fact is that it is one of the most delicate and gracious of the arts, and its delights penetrate every fiber of the being and become the basis of sympathy and understanding, companionship and co-operation, loyalty and devotion. Love is like the fire under the boilers, which gives power to all the machinery. Without it, life is a film in black and white; with it, the picture glows with all the colors of the rainbow.”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“What security could there be for any civilized person in any part of the world when bandits were permitted to seize the resources of nation after nation, to murder all the free-minded people and set all the wage-slaves to work producing mass destruction?”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“How many years ago was it that I heard you quoting Andrew Undershaft in Major Barbara? Have you forgotten ‘The True Faith of an Armorer’? ‘To give arms to all men who offer an honest price for them, without respect to persons or principles: to aristocrats and republicans, to Nihilist and Tsar, to Capitalist and Socialist, to Protestant and Catholic, to burglar and policeman, to black man, white man and yellow man, to all sorts and conditions, all nationalities, all faiths, all follies, all causes and all crimes.’ In the name of that True Faith you defended the selling of arms to Chinese mandarins and South American filibusters, and even to Nazis, who for ten years had no pretense of being a government, but were simply organized assassins shooting down their political opponents in the streets.”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“Blum called for an agreement among all the interested nations that none of them would supply armaments to either side. So began weeks of dickering, and then months of lying and cheating which took the heart out of every lover of justice. Blum would keep his pledges, while Hitler and Mussolini laughed at theirs. Who stands to gain when an honest man makes a bargain with thieves?”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“The taking of this small city was celebrated by crowding four thousand prisoners into the bullring, locking the gates, and then blasting them with machine guns. When the news of this horror reached Paris, the forces of the Front Populaire went wild. The Rightist press of course said it was all a Red lie; they adopted the regular Fascist tactics of denying everything and turning the accusations against the Reds, charging that they had committed such crimes and were trying to conceal them by a smoke-screen.”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“Franco has a few Spaniards, but mostly it’s the Foreign Legion and the Moors who are being used to crush the Spanish people.”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“Various persons had decided to burn churches and church buildings in Spain, as a means of putting an end to the use of religion in support of political reaction and industrial slavery. Lanny was sorry, because to him these old churches were sanctuaries of art and of such culture as had existed in their day.”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“Great moments do not last in a confused and helter-skelter world. The idealist dreams how things ought to go, but they don’t—there being no perfect human creatures or groups of them.”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“He told how the light of understanding had dawned upon his soul, and how he had striven like Prometheus to bring that light to others. There were men who sought to snuff it out and plunge the people into darkness; men who thought of human beings as beasts of burden, as machines from which toil could be extracted; whose hearts held no love for their fellows, no hope for their future, no generous impulse to lift them up, but only a greedy desire to extract from their labor the utmost material gain.”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“What he told them was to organize and defend their government to the last man and woman; to gather paving-stones and hurl them from the rooftops upon the Fascist invaders; to fight them with pikes, kitchen knives, and clubs with nails in; to take for their own the slogan of the French at Verdun:”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“Lanny felt that he had learned more about Spain in this village than in any of the great cities.”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“After the radio was turned off, Esteban made a speech, explaining why the landlords and money-lenders wanted to destroy the people’s government, and why the workers and peasants must be prepared to defend it with their lives. The determination of this audience was made manifest, but Lanny and Raoul could not see with what weapons these ill-nourished victims of land-erosion were going to meet planes and machine guns brought from Italy and Germany with the money of Juan March and the Duque de Alba.”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“Esteban made a speech, explaining why the landlords and money-lenders wanted to destroy the people’s government, and why the workers and peasants must be prepared to defend it with their lives. The determination of this audience was made manifest, but Lanny and Raoul could not see with what weapons these ill-nourished victims of land-erosion were going to meet planes and machine guns brought from Italy and Germany with the money of Juan March and the Duque de Alba.”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“Lanny had seen much poverty here and elsewhere, but never more gaunt and haggard humans than he found in this lonely valley in the naked hills of Aragon, bitter cold in winter and blazing hot in summer.”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“They have a right to kill us, but we have no right to kill them. You will see what a difference it makes.” And it did, in very truth. Sotelo and others of his sort had shot hundreds of workers and peasants all over Spain, and that had not counted with bourgeois newspapers at home or abroad. But here was a man of prominence, a member of the ruling classes, the man who was to have been made Presidente when the coup d’etat succeeded; and so this was murder, “most foul, strange, and unnatural.” Next day in the Cortes the Fascist political leader, Gil Robles, arose and said: “His blood is on the heads of those people who support the Popular Front.”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“Everybody knew who had murdered Castillo—except those heads of the government who believed in democracy and peace, in civil liberties and freedom of speech, so ardently that they couldn’t make any move against the sworn enemies of these blessings.”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“Arte Popular Espanol meant more than that the peasant women of Spain were to weave linens and sell them to rich ladies; it meant that the Spanish workers were to own great cooperatives with the best machinery and make abundance for themselves. “They shall build houses, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them. They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat; for as the days of a tree are the days of my people, and mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands.”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“You have no doubt heard the government denounced as anarchist or Communist—” “I hear that everywhere.” “There is not one anarchist, not one Communist, not even one Socialist in the Cabinet. We of the Left wished to be polite, and moderate, to move gradually and not give provocation; so our government is composed of lawyers and scholars, liberals and old-time democrats—men who have devoted their long lives to the cause of Spanish enlightenment, of a Spanish republic—but now they are tired and must not be too greatly disturbed. They are kindly and trusting, they do not wish to believe too much evil of mankind. We go to them and warn them, we plead, we all but fall down on our knees before them—but we cannot shake their faith in orderly processes, their belief that the decision rendered at the ballot box is sacred, that the will of the Spanish people is and must be inviolate.”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“Here, too, many would scold at the government, but for the opposite reason, that it couldn’t keep its mind made up; it was composed of polite old gentlemen who couldn’t bear to disturb things or to displease their subordinates, the bureaucrats, no matter what election results came in.”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“United States oil companies were taking Hitler’s money and constructing huge refineries of aviation gasoline in Hamburg; also that American manufacturers of magnesium were selling it to Hitler to be used for making bombs.”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“the ‘tobacco king’ from Majorca? I’m told that he began as a tobacco smuggler, and now he has put up several million pesetas for the rebellion. They say that General Francisco Franco is the Caudillo he has picked.”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“British capitalists don’t want a Left government in Spain; they’d be afraid of severance taxes. They want what they call a strong government, one that holds labor down and puts the taxes on the consumer.”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“But you know how our kind of people are; we don’t like violence and find it hard to believe in. Very sadly I’m beginning to wonder if we Socialists aren’t caught between two millstones and destined to be ground up. We think that when we’ve educated the people and got a majority of the votes, the matter is settled. That is supposed to be the rule in the political game.”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“the newspapers of France featured monasteries being burned, and peasant laborers proceeding to divide up the land, plow and plant it. Great Spanish landlords packed up their families and shipped them to France; here they were, camped in the hotels and villas of Cannes, in a mood receptive to tea-parties, dinner-dances, and other forms of elegant entertainment. So it came about that Lanny Budd, without any effort on his part, was in a position to learn about the Spanish governing classes, what they were saying, doing, and planning. They told him they hadn’t the slightest idea of adopting permanent residence abroad or of submitting to the loss of their estates and other privileges. They were going to fight for what they had been brought up to consider their rights.”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“The Spanish dictator hadn’t been “firm” enough, the polite way of saying that he hadn’t killed enough peasants and workers. The Reds had been allowed to conduct a political campaign and to win—and now look at the results! A jurist of a Pink tinge, Azana, had become President, and thirty thousand agitators and trouble-makers, thrown into jail by the old regime, had been suddenly turned loose upon the community.”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“Savages were meant to be subdued and put to work—what good were they otherwise, to themselves or anybody else? When Il Duce’s sons dropped mustard gas from airplanes among barefooted black soldiers and thus put them to rout, they were proving themselves superior beings,”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“Also, in each of the three nations was the same deadly and incessant struggle between rich and poor; between those who owned the land and working capital and those who did the hard labor for starvation wages.”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate