Upton Sinclair Oil Quotes

Dad, as a good American, believed his newspapers.

It appeared as if the whole world was one elaborate system, opposed to justice and kindness, and set to making cruelty and pain.

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

So the laws of good driving forbade you to go off the magic ribbon except in extreme emergencies. You were ethically entitled to several inches of margin at the right-hand edge; and the man approaching you was entitled to an equal number of inches; which left a remainder of inches between the two projectiles as they shot by. It sounds risky as one tells it, but the heavens are run on the basis of similar calculations, and while collisions do happen, they leave time enough in between for universes to be formed, and successful careers conducted by men of affairs.

Beneath the hundred thousand women of the elite are a million middle-class women, miserable because they are not of the elite, and trying to appear of it in public; and beneath them, in turn, are five million farmers' wives reading 'fashion papers' and trimming bonnets, and shop-girls and serving-maids selling themselves into brothels for cheap jewelry and imitation seal-skin robes. And then consider that, added to this competition in display, you have, like oil on the flames, a whole system of competition in selling! You have manufacturers contriving tens of thousands of catchpenny devices, storekeepers displaying them, and newspapers and magazines filled up with advertisements of them!

One might look at a Rembrandt picture, or hear a Beethoven symphony, without depriving others of the privilege; but one couldn’t become an oil king without taking oil away from others.

Their frail human nature was subjected to a strain greater than it was made for; the fires of greed had been lighted in their hearts, and fanned to a white heat that melted every principle and every law.

The British and the French were taking unto themselves those portions of Asia Minor which had oil, phosphates, and other treasures, or through which oil pipelines had to travel to the sea. Since the Fourteen Points had guaranteed the inhabitants of these lands the mastery of their own destinies, the subtle statesmen had racked their vocabularies to find some way of taking what they wanted while seeming not to. They had evolved a new word, or rather a new meaning for an old word, which was “mandate.

It was the same type of men all over the world. They tried to grab on another's coal and steel and oil and gold; yet, the moment they were threatened by their wage slaves anywhere, they got together to fight against the common peril. Do it with the army, do it with gangsters, do it with the workers' own leaders, buying them or seducing them with titles, honors, and applause!

The French delegates now wore a cynical smile as they argued before the commissions; they had their assurance that their armies were going to hold the Rhineland and the Sarre, and that a series of buffer states were to be set up between Germany and Russia, all owing their existence to France, all financed with the savings of the French peasants, and munitioned by Zaharoff, alias Schneider-Creusot. France and Britain were going to divide Persia and Mesopotamia and Syria and make a deal for the oil and the laying of pipelines. Italy was to take the Adriatic, Japan was to take Shantung—all such matters were being settled among sensible men. Lanny

I, the driver of this car, that used to be Jim Ross, the teamster, and J.A. Ross and Co., general merchandise at Queen Centre, California, am now J. Arnold Ross, oil operator, and my breakfast is about digested, and I am a little too warm in my big new overcoat because the sun is coming out, and I have a new well flowing four thousand barrels at Los Lobos river, and sixteen on the pump at Antelope, and I'm on my way to sign a lease at Beach City, and we'll make up our schedule in the next couple of hours, and 'Bunny' is sitting beside me, and he is well and strong, and is going to own everything I am making, and follow in my footsteps, except that he will never make the ugly blunders or have painful memories that I have, but will be wise and perfect and do everything I say.

but they know that’s all bait for suckers, and if you could hear them laughing at you behind your back, you’d realize how you’re being used.

You could never be sure how much of it was acting, for he was sly as the devil, and not above using his arts on those he loved.

You see, son, our business men are trading with the Germans all the time, regardless of politics. Standard Oil has a big deal regarding patent rights with I. G. Farben, the German dye trust, and so have the du Ponts. The A.E.G., the electrical trust, is in the same position, and I don’t doubt that the Hermann Goring Stahlwerke have many such understandings in America.

Listening to Monck’s story, Lanny realized that this had been an oil war. Lack of oil was the reason the mad Führer had had to drop his program of bombing Britain out of the war and to fall back upon a defensive program.

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.

Standard Oil of New Jersey and its arrangements with Germany concerning patents on the making of artificial rubber; about the du Ponts and their sale to Germany of the discoveries of their vast research laboratories

Most people had the impression that slavery had been abolished throughout the world some time ago, but when a king is also an oil magnate he can carry on a semi-secret slave trade across the Gulf of Aden, and his slaves are not automatically set free when they board an American war vessel.

a third Oriental potentate, whose difficult name in Arabic was ’Abd-al-’Azīz ibn-’Abd-al-Rahmān al-Faisal ibn-Su’ūd, King of Saudi Arabia. He was a very important potentate indeed, for he owned what was perhaps the greatest oil pool in the world, and was being paid some fifteen million dollars a year in royalties—no pun intended. His oil was the lifeblood of the American defense forces in the Mediterranean area, ships, planes and tanks, and so Ibn Saud could have anything he wanted to make him happy.

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.

The father kept two compartments in his mind, one for things that were right, and the other for things that existed, and which you had to allow to exist, and to defend, in a queer, half-hearted, but stubborn way. But here was this new phenomenon, a boy’s mind which was all one compartment; things ought to be right, and if they were not right, you ought to make them right, or else what was the use of having any right—you were only fooling yourself about it.

You mustn’t fool yourself with the idea that you could hire experts to attend to things; for how could you know that a man was an expert, unless you knew as much as he did? Some day your foreman might drop dead, or some other fellow would buy him away from you, and then where would you be? Be your own expert, said Dad!

Any boy will tell you that this is glorious. Whoopee! you bet! Sailing along up there close to the clouds, with an engine full of power, magically harnessed, subject to the faintest pressure from the ball of your foot. The power of ninety horses—think of that! Suppose you had had ninety horses out there in front of you, forty-five pairs in a long line, galloping around the side of a mountain, wouldn’t that make your pulses jump? And this magic ribbon of concrete laid out for you, winding here and there, feeling its way upward with hardly a variation of grade, taking off the shoulder of a mountain, cutting straight through the apex of another, diving into the black belly of a third; twisting, turning, tilting inward on the outside curves, tilting outward on the inside curves, so that you were always balanced, always safe—and with a white-painted line marking the centre, so that you always knew exactly where you had a right to be—what magic had done all this?

The ranchman drove to town in a nationally advertised auto, pressing the accelerator with a nationally advertised shoe; in front of the drug-store he found a display of nationally advertised magazines, containing all the nationally advertised advertisements of the nationally advertised articles he would take back to the ranch.

We have an arrangement with our bank; the bank does not sell soup, and we do not cash checks.

he realized what Dad meant when he compared the oil-game to heaven, where many are called and few are chosen.

It was pleasant to have a lot of money; but you must set up a skeleton at the feast, and while you quaffed the wine of success, you must hear a voice behind you whispering, “Memento mori!

You could not help being impressed by so much activity, even though you knew it was the activity of Satan.

They respected this “old man,” because he knew his business, and nobody could fool him. Also they liked him, because he combined a proper amount of kindliness with his sternness; he was simple and unpretentious—when the work was crowded, you would have him eating his beans and coffee on a stool in the “eats” joint alongside you. He

Чем больше вы делаете людям добра, тем меньше они вас ценят, считая, что вы обязаны это им делать.

- Мечта о любви, о настоящей искренней любви никогда не умирает в душе женщины. Жизнь делает иногда женщин циничными, заставляет их говорить, что они не верят в любовь, но это только слова. В глубине души они глубоко страдают, надеются и ждут, потому что для них любовь - самое важное в жизни.

Приятно сознавать, что у вас груды денег, но на своих пирах сажайте за стол скелет и, упиваясь вином успеха, прислушивайтесь к тихому шепоту: - Memento mori!

Вы не должны обманывать себя, воображая, что можете всегда нанять достаточно опытных специалистов; да и как можете вы судить об опытности данного специалиста, если сами не изучили дела также хорошо, как и он? Ваш-специалист может умереть, его может переманить какой-нибудь другой нефтепромышленник, и тогда что с вами будет? «Вы сами должны быть своим экспертом-специалистом», - говорил всегда отец.

All that a teacher had to do was to let these fellows ask questions, and quickly the whole group would be wandering in a maze, demoralized by what the Japanese government in its control of education describes as “dangerous thoughts.

in the next dark place a camel harnessed to a pole went round and round, working a press which squeezed olive oil from loads of the fruit; the camel had a hood over his face, so that he wouldn’t see what he was doing, and might dream that he was out on the desert trails where he had been born.

He has made the German economy into a war economy, and now he’ll be doing the same for the Austrian economy. It’s nonsense to say that he will stop when he has got the border territories where the Germans live; for what is he going to do with them? He can’t feed the people on machine-gun cartridges and airplane bombs—not even I. G. Farben is equal to that miracle of Ersatz. Even if Hitler should die tonight, Göring or Hess would be driven by the force he has created; they have to go after the potato fields of Poland and the wheat fields of the Ukraine, the minerals of the Balkans, and the oil of the Caucasus.

There were a few honest papers, but they reached only a small public; the big press was in the hands of the big interests, and told the people whatever suited the purposes of the masters of steel and munitions and oil.

The best that anyone could do for the present was to build him a not too costly home in some part of the earth where there was no gold, oil, coal, or other mineral treasure, and which was not near a disputed boundary or strategic configuration of land or water. There with reasonable luck he might have peace within his own walls, and perhaps think some thoughts which might be helpful to a hate-tormented world.

but in this new pagan civilization women were so startled by an encounter with chastity, it struck them as something colossal, superhuman.

Conversation at this dinner-party, as at most dinner-parties in America at that time, resembled a walk along the edge of a slippery ditch. Sooner or later you were bound to slide in, and after that you could not get out, but finished your walk in the ditch.

they were sober, church-going people, the sort who formed the Ku Klux Klan, and punished fornications and adulteries by tarring and feathering and riding on a rail.

He was near enough to see the imp of mischief dancing in her black eyes. “Young woman,” he said, “I give you fair notice. I have been in this water an hour, and I am cold. I was on my way out.

It’s hard to realize how ignorant people can be, when they read nothing but American newspapers and magazines.

In truth the land of the pilgrim’s pride no longer existed; in its place was the land of the millionaire’s glory.

We’re going to have roast spring lamb for dinner, but you didn’t consider it necessary to visit the slaughter-house.

The wobblies had a song about it in their jungles: “We go to work to get the cash to buy the food to get the strength to go to work to get the cash to buy the food to get the strength to go to work—” and so on,

Such was the result of an oil king’s resolve to manufacture culture wholesale, by executive order!

Men and women are not bodies only, and cannot be satisfied with delights of the body only. Men and women are minds, and have to have harmony of ideas. Can they be bored with each other’s ideas, and still be just as much in love? Men and women are characters, and these characters lead to actions—and what if they lead to different actions? What if the man wants to read a book, while the woman wants to go to a dance?

A lot of us are going to jail, and a lot more are going to die. The one thing we must be sure of is that we help to awaken the slaves.