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It Was Cold And Clammy In The Stone Cell; They Called It The "cooler," And Used It To Reduce The Temperature Of The Violent And Intractable. It Was A Trouble-saving Device; They Just Left The Man There And Forgot Him, And His Own Tormented Mind Did The Rest.

-Upton Sinclair

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It Was Cold And

Upton Sinclair

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It Was Cold And Clammy In The Stone Cell; They Called It The "cooler," And Used It To Reduce The Temperature Of The Violent And Intractable. It Was A Trouble-saving Device; They Just Left The Man There And Forgot Him, And His Own Tormented Mind Did The Rest.

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Wall Street Had Been Doing Business With Pieces Of Paper; And Now Someone Asked For A Dollar, And It Was Discovered That The Dollar Had Been Mislaid.

They Use Everything About The Hog Except The Squeal.

I Don't Know Whether Anyone Will Care To Examine My Heart, But If They Do, They Will Find Two Words There- 'social Justice.' For That Is What I Have Believed In And Fought For.

Over The Vast Plain I Wander, Observing A Thousand Strange And Incredible And Terrifying Manifestations Of The Bootstrap-lifting Impulse.

Through Fasting. . .i Have Found A Perfect Health, A New State Of Existence, A Feeling Of Purity And Happiness, Something Unknown To Humans.

When The Masters Of Industry Pay Such Sums For A Newspaper, They Buy Not Merely The Building And The Presses And The Name; They Buy What They Call The "good-will"- That Is, They Buy You. And They Proceed To Change Your Whole Psychology - Everything That You Believe About Life. You Might Object To It, If You Knew; But They Do Their Work So Subtly That You Never Guess What Is Happening To You!

They Were The Triumphant And Insolent Possessors; They Had A Hall, And A Fire, And Food And Clothing And Money, And So They Might Preach To Hungry Men, And The Hungry Men Must Be Humble And Listen. They Were Trying To Save Their Souls- And Who But A Fool Could Fail To See That All That Was The Matter With Their Souls Was That They Had Not Managed To Get A Decent Existence For Their Bodies?

Human Beings Suffer Agonies, And Their Sad Fates Become Legends; Poets Write Verses About Them And Playwrights Compose Dramas, And The Remembrance Of Past Grief Becomes A Source Of Present Pleasure - Such Is The Strange Alchemy Of The Spirit.

In A Society Dominated By The Fact Of Commercial Competition, Money Is Necessarily The Test Of Prowess, And Wastefulness The Sole Criterion Of Power.

Consider Christmas - Could Satan In His Most Malignant Mood Have Devised A Worse Combination Of Graft Plus Bunkum Than The System Whereby Several Hundred Million People Get A Billion Or So Gifts For Which They Have No Use, And Some Thousands Of Shop Clerks Die Of Exhaustion While Selling Them, And Every Other Child In The Western World Is Made Ill From Overeating - All In The Name Of The Lowly Jesus?

It Was All So Very Businesslike That One Watched It Fascinated. It Was Pork-making By Machinery, Pork-making By Applied Mathematics. And Yet Somehow The Most Matter-of-fact Person Could Not Help Thinking Of The Hogs; They Were So Innocent, They Came So Very Trustingly; And They Were So Very Human In Their Protests - And So Perfectly Within Their Rights! They Had Done Nothing To Deserve It; And It Was Adding Insult To Injury, As The Thing Was Done Here, Swinging Them Up In This Cold-blooded, Impersonal Way, Without Pretence At Apology, Without The Homage Of A Tear.

Insult To Injury

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.

Dad, As A Good American, Believed His Newspapers.

In The Twilight, It Was A Vision Of Power.

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Fascism Is Capitalism Plus Murder.

There Are A Score Of Great Religions In The World, Each With Scores Or Hundreds Of Sects, Each With Its Priestly Orders, Its Complicated Creed And Ritual, Its Heavens And Hells. Each Has Its Thousands Or Millions Or Hundreds Of Millions Of True Believers Each Damns All The Others With More Or Less Heartiness - And Each Is A Mighty Fortress Of Graft.

All Truly Great Art Is Optimistic. The Individual Artist Is Happy In His Creative Work. The Fact That Practically All Great Art Is Tragic Does Not In Any Way Change The Above Thesis.

We Define Journalism In America As The Business And Practice Of Presenting The News Of The Day In The Interest Of Economic Privilege.

But I Have A Conscience And A Religious Faith, And I Know That Our Liberties Were Not Won Without Suffering, And May Be Lost Again Through Our Cowardice. I Intend To Do My Duty To My Country.

Into This Wild-beast Tangle These Men Had Been Born Without Their Consent, They Had Taken Part In It Because They Could Not Help It; That They Were In Jail Was No Disgrace To Them, For The Game Had Never Been Fair, The Dice Were Loaded. They Were Swindlers And Thieves Of Pennies And Dimes, And They Had Been Trapped And Put Out Of The Way By The Swindlers And Thieves Of Millions Of Dollars.

A Large Section Of The Idling Classes Of England Get Their Incomes By Believing That Jesus Was Born Of A Virgin And That Jonah Swallowed A Whale; And With The Progress Of Science They Were Naturally Finding This More And More Difficult. A School Of Ingenious Bible-twisters Arose, To Invent Symbolical And Literary Meanings For Fairy Tales, In Order That People Who No Longer Believed Could Continue With Good Conscience To Collect The Salaries Of Belief.

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I Am Sustained By A Sense Of The Worthwhileness Of What I Am Doing; A Trust In The Good Faith Of The Process Which Created And Sustains Me. That Process I Call God.

I Aimed At The Public's Heart, And By Accident I Hit It In The Stomach.

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The Private Control Of Credit Is The Modern Form Of Slavery.

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Captains Of Industry

The Remedy [for The Great Depression] Is To Give The Workers Access To The Means Of Production, And Let Them Produce For Themselves, Not For Others, . . . The American Way.

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American Journalism Is A Class Institution, Serving The Rich And Spurning The Poor.

An Event Of Colossal And Overwhelming Significance May Happen All At Once, But The Words Which Describe It Have To Come One By One In A Long Chain.

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