The Jungle (novel) Quotes
American novels
Top Quotes
“Wikisource: The Jungle”
“Wikipedia: The Jungle (novel)”
“"What," asks the prophet, "is the murder of them that kill the body, to the murder of them that kill the soul?"”
““Communism in material production, anarchism in intellectual,” was the formula of modern proletarian thought.”
“Free eBook of: The Jungle at Project Gutenberg.”
“The veselija is a compact, a compact not expressed, but therefore only the more binding upon all.”
“Another book I recall, which caused an immediate change in my life, was The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. After reading it I forthwith became a vegetarian!”
“Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, a novel that introduced me to the horrors suffered by workers exploited by unchecked capitalism. Coach and I discussed it for days.”
“PBS special report marking the 100th anniversary of the novel”
“The Jungle serialized in The Sun newspaper from the Florida Digital Newspaper Library”
“Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism revisits The Jungle ”
“The working-man was to fix his hopes upon a future life, while his pockets were picked in this one; he was brought up to frugality, humility, obedience—in short to all the pseudo-virtues of capitalism.”
“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.”
“They say that the best dog will turn cross if he be kept chained all the time, and it was the same with the man; he had not a thing to do all day but lie and curse his fate, and the time came when he wanted to curse everything.”
“The line of the buildings stood clear-cut and black against the sky; here and there out of the mass rose the great chimneys, with the river of smoke streaming away to the end of the world. It was a study in colors now, this smoke; in the sunset light it was black and brown and gray and purple. All the sordid suggestions of the place were gone—in the twilight it was a vision of power.”
“It was Sinclair's The Jungle that really started me thinking about politics: I thought, good God, these people who are exploited in a meat-packing factory-they're just like blacks here. And the whole idea that people came to America, not knowing the language, having to struggle in sweat shops. . . I didn't relate this to my own father, because my father was bourgeois by then... but I related it to the blacks.”
“It was the incarnation of blind insensate Greed. It was a monster devouring with a thousand mouths, trampling with a thousand hoofs: it was the Great Butcher — it was the spirit of Capitalism made flesh. Upon the ocean of commerce it sailed as a pirate ship; it had hoisted the black flag and declared war upon civilization. Bribery and corruption were its everyday methods. In Chicago the city government was simply one of its branch offices.”
“Would the two, for his enlightenment, try to ascertain just what they had in common, and why they belonged to the same party? This resulted, after much debating, in the formulating of two carefully worded propositions: First, that a Socialist believes in the common ownership and democratic management of the means of producing the necessities of life; and, second, that a Socialist believes that the means by which this is to be brought about is the class conscious political organization of the wage-earners.”
“The little person who leads this trio is an inspired man. His fiddle is out of tune, and there is no rosin on his bow, but he is a very inspired man — the hands of the muses have been laid upon him. He plays like one possessed by a demon, by a whole horde of demons. You can feel them in the air round about him, capering frenetically; with their invisible feet they set the pace, and the hair of the leader of the orchestra rises on end, and his eyeballs start from their sockets, as he toils to keep up with them.”