The rich people not only had all the money, they had all the chance to get more; they had all the know-ledge and the power, and so the poor man was down, and he had to stay down.

He was the true king of our story tellers, the brightest star that flashed upon our skies.

As if political liberty made wage slavery any the more tolerable!

I think we simply have to recognize the fact that our enemies have succeeded in spreading the Big Lie.

Lanny smiled to himself. His chief called himself a “liberal,” and Lanny had been trying to make up his mind just what that meant. He decided that a liberal was a high-minded gentleman who believed the world was made in his own image.

The methods by which the “Empire of Business” maintains its control over journalism are four: First, ownership of the papers; second, ownership of the owners; third, advertising subsidies; and fourth, direct bribery. By these methods there exists in America a control of news and of current comment more absolute than any monopoly in any other industry.

But I have a conscience and a religious faith, and I know that our liberties were not won without suffering, and may be lost again through our cowardice. I intend to do my duty to my country.

Don’t complain about our coffee; someday you may be old and weak yourself.

I used to say to our audiences: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!

What life means to me is to put the content of Shelley into the form of Zola .

He is playing a bass part upon his cello, and so the excitement is nothing to him; no matter what happens in the treble, it is his task to saw out one long-drawn and lugubrious note after another, from four o’clock in the afternoon until nearly the same hour next morning, for his third of the total income of one dollar per hour.

It is up to you to prove that human beings do not have to be prowling wolves or sly lynxes, but can be rational, just, and kindly members of a commonwealth.

The proletarian writer is a writer with a purpose; he thinks no more of art for art’s sake than a man on a sinking ship thinks of painting a beautiful picture in the cabin; he thinks of getting ashore – and then there will be time enough for art.

In the most deeply significant of the legends concerning Jesus, we are told how the devil took him up into a high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time.

Into this wild-beast tangle these men had been born without their consent, they had taken part in it because they could not help it; that they were in jail was no disgrace to them, for the game had never been fair, the dice were loaded. They were swindlers and thieves of pennies and dimes, and they had been trapped and put out of the way by the swindlers and thieves of millions of dollars.

Lanny, climbing the hill, carried a thought which by now had become his familiar companion: Why, oh, why did men have to make their lives so ugly? What evil spell was upon them that they wrangled and scolded, hated and feared? He.

But the devil is a subtle worm; he does not give up at one defeat, for he knows human nature and the strength of the forces which battle for him.

Turn over the pages of history and read the damning record of the church’s opposition to every advance in every field of science.

Now and then it occurs to one to reflect upon what slender threads of accident depend the most important circumstances of his life; to look back and shudder, realizing how close to the edge of nothingness his being has come.

If you wanted to understand a politician you mustn’t pay too much attention to his speeches, but find out who were his paymasters. A politician couldn’t rise in public life, in France any more than in America, unless he had the backing of big money, and it was in times of crisis like this that he paid his debts.

Through fasting…I have found perfect health, a new state of existence, a feeling of purity and happiness, something unknown to humans.

I discover that hardly a week passes that some one does not start a new cult, or revive an old one; if I had a hundred life-times I could not know all the creeds and ceremonies, the services and rituals, the litanies and liturgies, the hymns, anthems and offertories of Bootstrap-lifting.

Men of unlimited means live lives of unbridled lust, and then, in their old age, they are helpless victims of their own impulses.

The supreme crime of the church to-day is that everywhere and in all its operations and influences it is on the side of sloth of mind; that it banishes brains, it sanctifies stupidity, it canonizes incompetence.

What, then, was the difference between America and Moscow? The “muckraker” said it was a question of who owned the state. In America the people were supposed to own it, but most of the time the big businessmen bought it away from them. “It is privilege which corrupts politics,” was his phrase.

The remedy [for the Great Depression] is to give the workers access to the means of production, and let them produce for themselves, not for others… the American way.

Let us redeem our great words from base uses. Let that no longer call itself Love, which knows that it is not free!

I intend to do what little one man can do to awaken the public conscience, and in the meantime I am not frightened by your menaces.

The first thing to do in teaching a peasant would be to try to break up the gangs of bandits that masquerade under the name of government.

Man is an evasive beast, given to cultivating strange notions about himself.

People don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.

American journalism is a class institution, serving the rich and spurning the poor.

They wish to build a new and better world, and I would be glad if they could succeed, and if I saw any hope of success I would join them. I ask for their plans, and they offer me vague dreams, in which as a man of affairs, I see no practicality. Is is like the the end of Das Rheingold: there is Valhalla, very beautiful, but only a rainbow bridge on which to get to it, and while the gods ma be able to walk on a rainbow, my investors and working people cannot.

To do that would mean, not merely to be defeated, but to acknowledge defeat- and the difference between these two things is what keeps the world going.

They use everything about the hog except the squeal.

Dad, as a good American, believed his newspapers.

People can withstand a brief period of adversity, but they cannot withstand if a man is not free.

The trouble with the profit system has always been that it was highly unprofitable to most people.

I say there is no modern evil which cannot be justified by these ancient texts, and there is nowhere in Christendom a clergy which cannot be persuaded to cite them at the demand of ruling classes.

The story of the hero who slays the devouring dragon was not merely a symbol of day and night, of summer and winter; it was a literal explanation of the phenomena, it was the science of early times.

Pessimism is a mental disease. It means illness in the person who voices it, and in the society which produces that person.

I have not only found good health, but perfect health; I have found a new state of being, a potentiality of life; a sense of lightness and cleanness and joyfulness, such as I did not know could exist in the human body.

The end of all political movement is to attain that highest and noblest common good which makes life worth living.

In the evening I came home and read about the Messina earthquake, and how the relief ships arrived, and the wretched survivors crowded down to the water’s edge and tore each other like wild beasts in their rage of hunger. The paper set forth, in horrified language, that some of them had been seventy-two hours without food. I, as I read, had also been seventy-two hours without food; and the difference was simply that they thought they were starving.

I’m a socialist, and have been fighting and will fight for an economic system where all people are equal and where everybody gets an opportunity to work.

It was cold and clammy in the stone cell; they called it the “cooler,” and used it to reduce the temperature of the violent and intractable. It was a trouble-saving device; they just left the man there and forgot him, and his own tormented mind did the rest.

Can you blame me if I am pursued by the thought of how much we could do to remedy social evils, if only we had an honest and disinterested press?

Man may be defined as the animal who can say, I do not know.

The private control of credit is the modern form of slavery.

All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescabably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.

American capitalism is predatory, and American politics are corrupt: The same thing is true in England and the same in France; but in all these three countries the dominating fact is that whenever the people get ready to change the government, they can change it.

The old wanderlust had gotten into his blood, the joy of the unbound life, the joy of seeking, of hoping without limit.

In the twilight, it was a vision of power.

If we are the greatest nation the sun ever shone upon, it would seem to be mainly because we have been able to goad our wage-earners to this pitch of frenzy.

Human beings suffer agonies, and their sad fates become legends; poets write verses about them and playwrights compose dramas, and the remembrance of past grief becomes a source of present pleasure – such is the strange alchemy of the spirit.

I just put on what the lady says. I’ve been married three times, so I’ve had lots of supervision.

Wall Street had been doing business with pieces of paper, and now someone asked for a dollar, and it was discovered that the dollar had been mislaid.

Fascism is capitalism plus murder.

I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.

One of the necessary accompaniments of capitalism in a democracy is political corruption.

There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything that he desires is outside; and there is another kind where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside.

The Jungle was written for the purpose of bringing the reader to see the plight of the workers in the slums, and the fearful deadliness of their surroundings.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

We define journalism in America as the business and practice of presenting the news of the day in the interest of economic privilege.

You don’t have to be satisfied with America as you find it. You can change it. I didn’t like the way I found America some sixty years ago, and I’ve been trying to change it ever since.