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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“He had to keep repeating Zoltan’s formula: “I am an art lover, and do not take sides on political questions.” To himself he said: “It’s exactly like living with Irma!”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“Wherever an American art expert traveled, in Europe, in England, in America, he found the privileged classes, his own kind of people, hypnotized by the Fuhrer’s flaming denunciations of Communism and the Red Menace. The ex-painter of postcards voiced their thoughts completely on this subject; he was their man and promised to do their job. In vain Lanny tried to make them realize that no slogan meant anything to Hitler, except the gaining and keeping of power; political opinions were an arsenal of weapons from which he picked up those which served his need at a certain moment of conflict.”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“the place would be forever haunted by the ghosts of statesmen, diplomats, functionaries of all sorts, some in splendid uniforms, others in austere black coats. Many were now dead and buried in far corners of the earth, but the evil they had done lived after them; they had sowed the dragon’s teeth, and already the armed men were beginning to rise out of the ground, in Italy, Germany, Japan; in other places the ground was trembling and one saw the round tops of steel helmets breaking through. Lanny and others who thought they understood dragon agriculture predicted a bumper crop, perhaps the biggest in history.”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“And it was the same with many of his habits; elegance was a sign of caste, and he chose to be one of the “workers”—although he had never worked at anything but making pictures and speeches. He chose to believe that everything the workers did was right and that everything the rich did was wrong, this being in accordance with the doctrine of economic determinism as he understood it.”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“Hitler has written in his book that you can get any lie believed if you repeat it often enough; and especially if it’s a big lie—because people will say that nobody would dare to tell one as big as that. It is no exaggeration to say that he has made Germany into a headquarters of the Lie; he has told so many and so often that nobody in his country has any means of distinguishing truth from falsehood.”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“For when you let down the bars and admitted the right to lie and to cheat, you were undermining the very bases upon which human societies are built. Particularly when you admitted the right of political parties to lie and cheat, for how, then, could anybody have faith in them? How could their own followers know what they were or what they would become?”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“A few enjoyed money and ease, and they set the standards, very high; a swarm of lesser folk tried to imitate them, in dress, entertainment, a thousand forms of extravagance; the result was a mob of people ravenous for money and ready to commit any sort of indecency to get”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“Hearts are luxuries,” Lanny told her; “like the frills on your dresses and the lace on your handkerchiefs. You could afford them, because you were born in a secure society where ideals and standards were fixed and you knew exactly what was right. But now the world is changing, and the young people don’t understand it; they know that the old standards are false but they haven’t found any new ones.”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“He knew he might never see either of them again; and anyhow, to go away is to die a little.”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“They talked about “the States” for a while, and Lanny explained the New Deal to the young Englishmen. It was making many blunders, he said, but was establishing the principle of public responsibility for economic insecurity; also it was training a great army of social-minded men and women in the public service. “Nobody can run a government until he has learned about the machinery,” opined Robbie Budd’s heretical son.”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labor that I had labored to do: and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.”
― Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate

“if there is no future, we shall never know it. The days before we existed did not trouble us too greatly.”
― 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? Planes and bombs to wreck cities, submarines to torpedo steamships, monstrous tanks to roll over farmlands, crush human beings, and blast everything in their paths! You wanted to go out and ring an alarm bell—but who would heed it? This was a world of half-blind people who made a religion out of total blindness, and elected to power and responsibility only those who could see nothing, and would let nobody tell them what lay in front of their noses.”
― 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