Upton Sinclair

“ I say that if men and women would recognize the perpetuation of the honeymoon as the purpose of marriage, and would devote to that end one-hundredth part of the intelligence and energy they now devote to the killing of their fellow human beings in war, we might have an end to the wretched "romantic tradition" which makes the most sacred emotion of the human heart into a sneak-thief skulking in the darkness, entering our lives by back alleys and secret stairways—while greed and worldly pomp, dullness and boredom, parade in by the front entrance. ”

“ I am aware that it is possible for a society to be so corrupted, so given up to the admiration of imitations, of the paint and powder and silk-stocking-clad-ankle kind of love, that true and genuine love interest, with its impulse to self-sacrifice and self-consecration, is no longer felt or understood. I am aware that in such a society it is possible for even the very young to be so sophisticated that what they take to be love is merely vanity, the worship of money, and the grace and charm which the possession of money confers. ”

“ This is the real secret of true happiness in the conduct of our personal lives; to acquire self-control, to rule our desires and our passions, not harshly and spasmodically, but serenely, as one drives a car which he thoroughly understands. It is in vain that we preach freedom to men who have not this self-mastery; as the poet tell us: "The sensual and the dark rebel in vain, slaves of their own compulsion." And of all the personal possessions which man can attain on this earth, the most precious is the one of a sound mind controlling a sound body. ”

“ If the theory doesn't "work"—that is, if it doesn't explain all the facts and stand all the tests—it is thrown away like a worn-out shoe. So little by little a body of knowledge is built up which is real knowledge; which will serve us in our daily lives, which we can use as foundation-stones in the structure of our civilization.
By this method of research man is expanding his universe beyond anything that could have been conceived in the pre-scientific days. Hour by hour, while we work and play and sleep, the mind of our race is discovering new worlds in which our posterity will dwell. ”

“ Money will buy things, but it no longer buys power, the right to rule other men; it no longer buys men's admiration. Everybody now has money, and nobody is any longer afraid of starvation. It is no longer the fashion to save money—any more than it is the fashion to carry revolvers in drawing-rooms or to wear chain mail in place of underclothing. So our political life is cleansed of the money influence. People now get power by persuading their fellows, not by buying them or threatening them. The world is no longer full of men ravenous for jobs, and ready to sell their soul for a "position." ”

“ This preying and being preyed upon, this mixture of cruelty and terror, is a conspicuous fact of nature; if you go into any orthodox school or college in America today, you will be taught that it is nature's most fundamental law, and governs all living things. If you should take a course in political economy under a respectable professor, you would find him explaining that such cruelty-terror applies equally in human affairs; it is the basis of all economic science, and the effort to escape from it is like the effort to lift yourself by your boot-straps. ”

“ Let the government issue all money, and use it for the transfer of industry from private into public hands. Do we want to socialize our railroads, our coal mines, our telegraphs and telephones? Do we want to buy them, in order to avoid the wastes of civil war and insurrection? We have agreed that we do; and here we have the way of doing it. If the bankers can create, out of our willingness to trust them, billions upon billions of imaginary money, then so can we, the people of the United States, create money out of our willingness to trust ourselves. ”

“ Stop and consider how preposterous it is that the five million organized workers of the United States should deposit their hundreds of millions of savings in capitalist banks, to be used to finance private undertakings which crush unions and hold labor in bondage. Let every big labor union have its own building, its own banking and insurance business, its own vacation camp in the country, its own school for training its future leaders. Also, let every labor council in every big city start a labor daily, to tell the workers the truth and point the way to freedom. ”

“ Business booms, because everybody believes everybody else's promises; credit expands like a huge balloon, with the breath of everybody's enthusiasm. But meantime real business, the real market, remains just what it was before; it cannot increase, because of the iron ring which restricts the buying power of the mass of the people by the competitive wage. So presently the time comes when somebody realizes that he has over-capitalized his hopes; he curtails his orders, he calls in his money, and the impulse thus started precipitates a crash in the whole business world. ”

“ Conduct is not merely marriage and birth and premature death; it is not merely eating and drinking and sleeping: it is thinking and aspiring; it is religion and science, music and literature and art. It is not yet the lightning and the cyclone, but with the spread of knowledge it is coming to be these things, and I suspect that some day it may be even the comet and the rising of the sun.
We are now going to apply our reason to this enormous problem of human conduct; we are going to ask ourselves the question: What kind of life do we want? What kind of life are we going to make? ”

“ I devote a good deal of space to this question of a fixed and unchangeable morality, because it is one of the heaviest burdens that mankind carries upon its back. The record of human history is sickening, not so much because of blood and slaughter, but because of fanaticism; because wherever the mind of man attempts to assert itself, to escape from the blind rule of animal greed, it adopts a set of formulas, and proceeds to enforce them, regardless of consequences, upon the whole of life. ”

“ What I do deny is that it does any harm to repress a physical desire which is unaccompanied by the higher elements of sex; that is to say, by affection, admiration, and unselfish concern for the sex-partner and her welfare. When I advise a man to resist and suppress and destroy the impulse toward lust in his nature, I am not telling him to live a sexless life. I am telling him that if he represses lust, then love will come; whereas, if he yields to lust, then love may never come, he may make himself incapable of love, incapable of feeling it or of trusting it, or of inspiring it in a woman. ”

“ Living in a world of pecuniary prestige, every particle of the woman's surplus energy must go into some form of ostentation, into buying or making things which are futile and meaningless. In such a blind world, dazed by such a struggle, women become irritable, they lose their sex charm, they forget all about love; so the husband gives up hoping for the impossible, accepts the common idea that love and marriage are incompatible, and adopts the formula that what his wife doesn't know will not hurt her. ”

“ He still has memories of this startling experience, still hints of it in his consciousness; something still leaps in his memory, like a race-horse, or like the war-horse of Revelations, which "scenteth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains and the shouting." Because of these things he can never accept any philosophy which shackles the human spirit, he will never in his thought attempt to set bounds to the possibilities of human life. ”

“ The working-class girl, born to drudgery and perpetual child-bearing, has a brief hour in which her cheeks are red and her beauty is ripe; and out of the heaven above her steps a male creature panoplied in the armor of ruling class prestige—that is to say, a dress suit—and scattering about him a shower of automobile rides, jewelry and candy and flowers. She opens her arms to him; and then, when her brief hour of rapture is past, she becomes the domestic drudge of some workingman, or else the inmate of a brothel. ”

“ Henry Smith Williams' "Miracles of Science."
Or will you choose the universe of the subconscious, our racial past locked up in the secret chambers of our mind? Or will you choose the universe of the superconscious, the infinity of genius manifested in the arts? By the device of art man not merely creates new life, he tests it, he weighs it and measures it, he tries experiments with it, as the physicist with the molecule and the astronomer with light. He finds out what works, and what does not work, and so develops his moral and spiritual muscles, training himself for his task as maker of life. ”

“ There is a form of wisdom called experience and there is another form called love.
I hear the worldly and cynical rail at the blindness of "young love," and I can see the truth in what they say; but also I can see the deeper truth in the magic dreams of the young soul. Here is a youth who adores a girl, and you know the girl, and it is comical to you, because you know she is not any of the things the youth imagines. But who are you that claim to know the last thing about a human soul? ”

“ I believe that human beings are meant to be happy on this earth, and to avoid misery and disease. I believe that they are given the powers of intelligence in order to seek the ways of happiness, and I believe that it is a worthy work to give them the knowledge they need in order to find happiness.
At the outset of this Book of Love we are going to examine the existing facts of the sex relationships of men and women in present-day society. We shall discover that amid all the false and dishonest thinking of mankind, there is nowhere more falsity and dishonesty than here. ”

“ I do not say that I believe, I say I know, that free and happy love, guided by wisdom and sound knowledge, is not merely conducive to health, but is in the long run necessary to health.
People who condemn birth control always argue as if one wished to teach this knowledge indiscriminately to the young. Perhaps it is natural that those who oppose the use of reason should assume that others are as irrational as themselves. All I can say is that I no more believe in teaching birth control to the young than I believe in feeding beefsteak to nursing infants. ”

“ So many people unhappy, so many striving for what they cannot get! So many having to be locked behind bars, like savage beasts, because they demand something which the world is resolved not to let them have! So many having to be killed, by rifles and machine-guns, by high explosive shells and poison gas—because they misunderstood the social facts about them, and thought they could fulfill some wishes which the rest of mankind wanted them to repress! ”

“ Herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue. But for her, the unchallenged purity of countless happy homes would be polluted, and not a few who, in the pride of their untempted chastity, think of her with an indignant shudder, would have known the agony of remorse and despair. On that one degraded and ignoble form are concentrated the passions that might have filled the world with shame. She remains, while creeds and civilizations rise and fall, the eternal priestess of humanity, blasted for the sins of the people. ”

“ I see before my eyes the wretch cowering upon the witness stand, and the virtuous district attorney, who has perhaps spent the previous night in a brothel, pointing a finger of accusing wrath into his face, and thundering, "Do you believe in free love?" The wretch, if he is wise, will not hesitate or parley; he will not ask what the district attorney means by love, or what he means by freedom. ”

“ Man, in his new pride of power, has invented a philosophy which he dignifies by the name of "individualism." He lives and works for himself; he chooses to wear silk shirts, and to break the speed limit, and to pin ribbons and crosses on his chest. Now what he must do with his new morality, if he wishes to save himself from degeneration, is to manifest the wisdom and far vision of the old mother whom he spurned, and to say to himself, deliberately, as an act of high daring: I will protect the species, I will preserve the type! ”

“ What if I were to tell you that there might be in "you," or in your body, half a dozen different personalities which you have never known or dreamed of, and that tomorrow there might break out a war between them and "you," as to which of the half dozen people should hear with your ears and speak with your tongue and walk about with your clothes on? Unless you are familiar with the literature of multiple personality, you would surely say that this was unbelievable—quite as much so as a mathematical horse! ”

“ Why should we waste our time working out systems of "credit-cards," when we already have a system in the form of gold and silver coins and paper currency? Why should we bother with "labor checks," when we have a banking and clearing-house system, understood by everyone but the illiterate? The only difference we shall make is that nobody can get gold and silver coins or paper currency, except by performing labor to pay for them; nobody can have money in the bank and draw checks against it, until he has rendered to society an equivalent amount of service. ”

“ And each one of these diseases and abnormalities is a new life of its own; it develops a body of knowledge, a science, and perhaps an art; it becomes the means of life, the environment and the determining destiny of thousands, perhaps millions, of human beings. So continues the growth of the colossal structure which we call civilization—in part still healthy and progressive, but in part as foul and deadly as a gigantic cancer. ”

“ Without birth control there can be no freedom, no happiness, no permanence in love, and there can be no mastery of life. Birth control is one of the great fundamental achievements of the human reason, as important to the life of mankind as the discovery of fire or the invention of printing. Birth control is the deliverance of womankind, and therefore of mankind also, from the blind and insane fecundity of nature, which created us animals, and would keep us animals forever if we did not rebel. ”