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“ ”All day long this man would toil thus, his whole being centered upon the purpose of making twenty-three instead of twenty-two and a half cents an hour; and then his product would be reckoned up by the census taker, and jubilant captains of industry would boast of it in their banquet halls, telling how our workers are nearly twice as efficient as those of any other country. 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.
About Upton Sinclair
Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr. (20 September 1878 – 25 November 1968) was a prolific American author who wrote in many genres, often advocating Socialist views, and achieved considerable popularity in the first half of the twentieth century.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Shorter versions of this quote
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.
Additional quotes by Upton Sinclair
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.
Say the very simplest and most obvious things, say them as often as possible, and put into the saying all the screaming passion which one human voice can carry — that was Adolf Hitler's technique. No matter whether it was true or not — for (Hitler) meant literally his maxim that the bigger the falsehood, the easier to get it believed; people would say you wouldn't dare make up a thing like that. Imagine the worst possible about your enemies and then swear that you knew it, you had seed it, it was God's truth and you were ready to stake your life upon it — shout this, bellow this, over and over, day after day, night after night...when ten million join in it becomes history.
He was carried over the difficult places in spite of himself; and he went plunging away in mad career — a very Mazeppa-ride upon the wild horse Speculation.