Upton Sinclair Quotes

You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.

Having been a journalist for thirty-nine years, I've developed a pretty thick skin.

Americans have known about mounting inequality and king-sized Wall Street bonuses for years. But we also had an entire genre of journalism dedicated to brushing the problem off.

It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.

In America itself, after 30 years of experimenting with the Great Society programs, there is widespread crime and violence, children kill each other with guns, neighborhoods are insecure, old people feel forgotten, families are falling apart. And the media attacks the integrity and character of your leaders with impunity, drags down all those in authority and blames everyone but itself.

If class warfare is being waged in America, my class is clearly winning.

Journalist, in my opinion, are mediators between the Information Age and our democracy.

God help the rich, the poor can look after themselves

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

My dream was to do political journalism.

If all we've got is the dirt poor and the filthy rich, the dirt poor would eat the filthy rich.

A lot of the things that we think of as being racial differences are really class differences in America.

There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.

From class consciousness to class hatred was but a step.

I am a brigand: I live by robbing the rich.' 'I am a gentleman: I live by robbing the poor.

The interesting thing about class warfare is that it's only class warfare if it's up, not down. If you talk about welfare cheats or something, that's not class warfare because it's down; you have to talk about rich people before it's class warfare.

I was told that the privileged and the people formed two nations.

Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.

The Class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.

I regard class differences as contrary to justice and, in the last resort, based on force.

Necessity is the constant scourge of the lower classes, ennui of the higher ones.

I didn't say one negative word about poor people or about middle-class people or anything else. All I said was that the rich deserve our gratitude.

We have a new class in this country: the deserving rich. ... The deserving rich do nice things for each other. Comforting the unafflicted is something that comes naturally to them.

The indiscriminate denunciation of the rich is mischievous.... No poor man was ever made richer or happier by it. It is quite as illogical to despise a man because he is rich as because he is poor. Not what a man has, but what he is, settles his class. We can not right matters by taking from one what he has honestly acquired to bestow upon another what he has not earned.