Oil! Quotes Upton Sinclair

A collection of quotes and thoughts from Oil!

It is as exciting as the title makes it sound! There are lots of exclamations throughout!

After months of teen fiction, it is good to see a skilled writer working for an adult audience.

"Poor devils," he would say, "they don't get much." He knew, because he had been one of them, and he never lost an opportunity to explain it to the boy. To him it was real, and to the boy it was romantic.
Pg 12

Other people were "queer"; but just why they were queer was something not yet explained.
Pg 12

sent from my phone. sorry about the spelling errors.

"Also there were no end of advertising signs, expecially contrived to lend variety to travel. "Picture ahead; kodak as you go," was a frequent legend, and you looked for the picture, put never could be sure what it was. A tire manufacturer had set up big wooden figures of a boy waving a flag; Dad said this boy looked like Bunny, and Bunny said he looked like a picture of Jack London he had seen in a magazine. Antoerh tire manufacturer had a great open book, made of wood, and set up at a turn of the road leading into each town; it was supposed to be a history book, and told you something about that place - facts at once novel and instructive..."

pg 16

...decorated rocks and railway culverts with inscriptions: "Prepare to meet thy God." Then would come to a traffic sign: "Railroad crossing. Stop. Look. Listen." The railroad company wanted you to meet your God through some other agency, Dad explained, because there would be damage suits for taking religious faith too seriously.

pg 16-17

Each town consisted of some tens, or hundreds, or thousands of perfectly rectangular blocks, divided into perfectly rectangular lots, each containing a strictly modern bungalow, with a lawn and a house-wife holding a hose. On the outskirts would be one or more "subdivisions," as they were called; "acreage" was being laid out into lots, and decorated with a row of red and yellow flags fluttering merrily in the breeze; also a row of red and yellow signes which asked questions and answered them with swift efficiency: "Gas? Yes." "Water? Best Ever." "Lights? Right." "Restrictions? You bet." "Schools? Under construction." "Scenery? Beats the Alps." - and so on.

Pg 21

Here were trolley tracks and railroads, and subdivisions with no "restrictions" - that is, you might build any kind of house you pleased, and rent it to people of any race or color; which meant an ugly slum, spreading like a great sore, with shanties of tin and tar-paper and unpainted boards. There were great number of children playing here- for some strange reason there seemed to be more of them where they were least apt to thrive.

pg 21

When you passed the threshold of the house, the first thing you saw was shine... In the back of the room, most striking feature of all, was a wooden staircase, with a balustrade, also shiny and wavy; this staircase went up, and made a turn, and there was a platform with a palm tree in a pot. You would take it for granted that it was a staircase like all other staircases, intended to take you to the second story. You might go into the Groarty home a hundred times, and see it both day and night, before it would occur to you there was anything wrong; but suddenly - standing outside on some idle day- it would flash over you that the Groarty home had a flat roof over its entire extent, and at no part was there any second store.
pg 28

...and Bunny learned the difficult lesson that human nature is a complicated thing, so that the same fat lady can be at one moment a hyena of greed, and at the next a mater dolorosa.
Pg 58

All his life that he could remember, home had been a place which you rented, or bought with the idea of holding it as real estate speculation. As the Indians in the Hudson Bay country kill a moose in the winter-time, and move to the moose, so Dad started an oil-well and moved to the well.
Pg 62

...and he had made a fortune late in his life, and lifted her to leisure at the end of hers. You might have been a long time guessing what use she was going to make of it. Out of a clear sky she announced that she was going to be a painter!
Pg 63

She would be pained by her father's grammar: "oh, dad, don't sat 'jist'!" And dad would grin again, and reply: "I been a-sayin' it jist fifty-nine years." But all the same, he began a-sayin' it less frequently; which is how civilization progresses.
Pg 71

... he never did succeed in understanding, all his life long, how people could fail to be interested in other people.
Pg 71

But in truth, it was hardly reasonable to expect Bertie, who was going to school in order to learn to admire money - to find out by intuition exactly how much money everybody had, and rate them accordingly - should be moved to admiration by a man who insisted that you had no right to money unless you had earned it!
Pg 71

...Dad had the cash - and still more impartant, the reputation for having the cash!
Pg 74

Bunny's eyes took in these things, and he realized what Dad meant when he compared the oil-game to heaven, where many are called and few are chosen.
Pg 73

Just as Dad kept a safe-deposit box at the bank, into which nobody ever looked but himself, so Bunny kept a secret place in his own mind. Outwardly, he was a cheerful and frank little fellow, if somewhat too mature for his years; but all the time he was leading a dual life - picking up ideas here adn there, and carrying them off and hiding them, as a squirrel does nuts, so that he may come back at a later season and crack them open and nibble them. Some nuts were good and some were bad, and Bunny learned to judge them, and to throw away the bad ones.
Pg 81

There were two pneumatic pillows, and a pneumatic mattress, which you sat and puffed at until you were red in the face - it was great sport!
Pg 89

and dad said potatoes would do jist as good, they'd boil some for supper; and Mr. Watkins said they'd git 'em quicker if the missus was to bile 'em on the stove - thus showing a complete misapprehension of the significance of a camping-trip.
Pg 89

And there was the goat's milk, rich and creamy, cold from the "spring-house;" you didn't mind the strong flavor, because you persuaded yourself it was romantic.
Pg 90

... and Bunny smiled to himself again, for he never yet had seen the time when Dad did not happen to have exactly the right document, or the right tool, or the right grub, or the right antiseptic and surgical tape, stowed away somewhere in that car!
Pg 105

The school was free, and to it came the sons and daughters of that part of the population which did not have to go to work before the age of eighteen or twenty. This meant all the moderately well-to-do people; and the boys and girls, thus constituting an economic stratum, proceeded to arrange themselves in sub-strata upon the same principle.

Pg 108

"While on the other side of the world men were staggering about in darkness and mud and snow, lind with fatigue, or with their eyes shot out, or their entrails dragging in the dirt, the sun would be shining in California, and Bunny would be facing a crowd of one or two thousand school children, lined up on benches and shrieking in unison : "rah, rah, rah, slippery, slam! - wallibazoo, bazim, bazam ! Beach city."
Pg 115

Regarding a burned anti religious book that led to a beating
"...maybe Bunny had heard of it. Bunny never had; but naturally, he resolved to find a copy, and read it, and tell Ruth all that was in it."
Pg 117

Eli was now eighteen, and had attained the full stature of a man; also his voice was that of a man, except that now and then it cracked and went up in a way that would have been comical, if anybody that listened to Eli ever had a sense of fun.
Pg118

When you happen to be the son of a successful oil operator, you can make your dreams come true.
Pg 125

...he still had his stubborn pride - he would never ask a favor, and he never thrust himself forward, but held back until he was called upon.
Pg 126

"That's a fine young fellow, son"; and then Bunny felt a glow of pride, right up to the roots of his hair - because, you see, Paul was his discovery, just like the Paradise oil-field, that was some day going to occupy this spot!
Pg 127

"The money is sacred," he said; "it belongs to the Holy Spirit, and Eli is His treasurer."
Pg 129

In contrast to the frivolous life in the us
And meantime the nations of europe had established for themselves two lines of death, extending all the way across the continent; and millions of men, as if under the spell of some monstrous enchantment, rushed to these lines to have their bodies blown to pieces and their lifeblood poured out upon the ground. The newspapers told about battles that lasted for months, and the price of petroleum products continued to pile up fortunes for J. Arnold Ross.
Pg 130

Their talk was all about one another, and they had so many cryptic allusions and so much home-made slang that it amounted almost to a new language. Bunny didn't like any of them well enough to be interested in deciphering it...
Pg 131

Dear, kind old Dad, that was anxious to do everything for his boy - that would even do his lying for him! How could any boy refuse to be content with such a happy solution of his ethical problems?
Pg 134

The office holder, said dad, was either a poor devil who needed a fifth rate salary, or else he was a man actuated by vanity, he liked to make speeches, and be applauded by the crowd, and see his picture in the papers.
Pg 142

He provided that promptness and efficiency that business men had to have, and that couldn't be got under our american system.
Pg 143

Consider the whole paragraph
...he found it an immense convenience when old loves consent to die painlessly, and without making a fuss! Without realizing it, he got ready to fall in loce with some new girl.
Pg 148

...eli watkins, Profit of the Third Revelation, transfigured and glorified in a stiff white collar and black tie and black broadcloth suit, ill-fitting but expensive, and with a manner cut in the same pattern, that peculiar blend of humble pride which the divine profession generates.
Pg 149

But there was a whimsical streak in J. Arnold Ross, which bubbled up once in a while, and caused queer turns of events.
Pg 150

And so there you were, a regular consecration!
Pg 150

...he'd not exchange his eight hour job for Dad's eighteen hour job. This was a subtle kind of flattery, and gave Dad a tremendously high opinion of paul.
Pg 151

You lived in a little narrow circle of your own consciousness, and, as people said, what you didn't know didn't hurt you.
Pg 155

Obviously, it didn't really do the poor devil any good to preach and pray over his mangled corpse; but at least it was something, and there were people who came and did it, and all you had to do was jist stand bare-headed in the sun for a while, and hand the preacher a ten dollar bill afterwards. Yes that was the procedure - in death, as in life; you wanted something done, and there was a person whose business it was to do that thing, and you paid him.
Pg 155

...he couldn't get any fun out of mangled bodies.
Pg 156

Dad was always fooling himself that way; there was going to be some time in the future when he would be free!
Pg 171

To the hour of his death, the elder Ross never really understood this strange son of his. He was always being surprised by the intensity with which Bunny took things, which to the father were part of the nature of life. The father kept two compartments in his mind, one for things that were right, and the other for things that existed, and which you had to allow to exist, and to defend, in a queer, half-hearted, but stubborn way. There was this new phenomenon, a boy's mind which was all one compartment; things ought to be right, and if they were not right, you ought to make them right, or else what was the use of having any right - you were only fooling yourself about it.

Pg 177

...it is hard for humble working-men to confront their employer, a "big" man, and armed with the magic power of money.
Pg 178

This jibe hurt, becauase it summed up to Bunny the part he was playing in this struggle- growing roses on the barbed wire fence which separated capital from labor. Pg 187

She was a dashing and brilliant young person, who knew how to spend a great deal of money in super-elegant ways, in the company of other young persons possessing the same accoplishment...
Pg 187-188

What was the use of having a lot of money if you didn't have a good time with it?
Pg 188

He had an impuls to jump into the arena and help the team - but alas, the rules of the game forbade such action!
Pg 189

Everybody said it had to be; and yet something in Bunny would not cease to dream of a world in which people did not maim and kill one another, and destroy, not merely the happiness of others, but their own.
Pg 189

...But then, Bunny was an "idealist," and such people are seldom satisfied in this harsh world.
Pg 190

...you're soft... You have a good heart, and you know what's right, but you couldn't bear to act, you'd be too afraid of hurting somebody.
Pg 195

...all this terric power felt its hand suddenly grasped by a stronger hand, and drawn back from the throat of its victim! Another god descended from a machine - a lean old Yankee divinity, with a white goatee and a suit made of red and white stripes with ble stars spangled over it; Uncle Sam himself streched out his mighty hand, and declared that oil workers were human beings as well as citizens, and would be protected in their rights as both!
Pg 196

Bunny had not realized that this was exactly a petting party, but you can see that it would not have been polite of him to say so.
Pg 200

"Holding hands" was now walking on a slippery ledge, over a dark abyss where pleasure and pain were so mingled you could hardly tell them apart.
Pg 201

Chapter viii (the war) section 2 has lots of great stuff about unconventional relationships in the teens

...were in a terrible "state," but they could not say why - such was the handicap the old generation imposed upon themselves.
Pg 203

All that she said was, "I'm glad you've consented to take an interest in something beside oil and strikers for a change." But behind that sentence lay such an ocean of calm feminine knowledge!
Pg 203

So the excitements of sex were mingled in Bunny's mind with those of patriotism. The two were not so far apart as you might think...
203

Bunny, the young idealist, swollowed every word of the propaganda; it was exactly what he wanted to believe, his kind of mental food. He would argue with his cool, slow-moving, quietly dubious father.
Pg 204

All this was part of Bunny's education; he listened and learned. From his quiet, steady old father he learned to smile amiably over the foibles of human nature, and to go on gathering in the dollars. Talk was all right, but after all what was going to win the war was bullets and shells...
Pg 205

It was the etiquette of parties that the man who had to drive must drink only gin - not because that would not make him drunk, but because it left no odor on his breath!
Pg 209

You told the folks at home that you had spent the night with a friend, and they did not pursue the matter - being afraid of what they might find out.
Pg 209

References to the "Bolsheviki revolution"
Bunny could see now the folly of that "idealism" he had been prattling, his idea of letting strikers have their way, and turning industry over to the mob. Here was the thing tried out in practice, and how did he like it? Bunny had to admit that he didn't like it so well, and he was crushed and sobered.
Pg 215

...she had just been getting a serious talk from her mother, who had explained there was going to be a shortage of foof and all kinds of materials, as a result of the war and the needs of our allies. The club-ladies had decided upon their duty- they would purchase only the most expensive kinds of fod, so as to leave the lard and cabbage and potatoes for the poor...
Pg 215

...the same blind and stupid world that was killing millions of people;... the whole thing was a chaos of cruelty, and it didn't matter what you did, or which side won.
Pg 216-217

Some day maybe we'll know what they're doing, but it won't be from newspaper stories made up by the allied diplomats and the exiled grand dukes.
Pg 219

...and apparently managed to escape every one of the calamities which Bunny had feared for her.
Pg 217

Pg 220
Look into notion of secret treaties of wwi and imperialist aims of the allies

...what could a good American do, in war-time like this, but trust his government?
Pg 221

Therby their sins were washed from the very last hair of their bodies, and if from the holy water they contracted any of those diseases which are the penalty of sins,... well, all they had to do was come back again and have themselves "healen" by the prophet of the Third Revelation.
Pg 222

Never could a man who took himself a wife in Southern California complain that he did not know what he was getting!
Pg 223

...he found his lips held in one of those long slow kisses which are sure fire hits on the silver screen, but which the censors cut to a footage varying according to geography - 00 in Japan up to 8,000 in Algeria and the Argentine.
Pg 224

...it was a victory for that golden flood of eloquence that was being poured out from the White House.
Pg 225

...Czecho-Slovaks. This was a new mane - you looked it up in the encyclopedias and couldn't find it, and had to have it explained to you that they were Bohemians, but this was a German word, and just as we had changed hamburger into liberty steak and sauerkraut into liberty cabbage, so the Bohemians became Czecho-Slovaks, which nobody knew how to spell when they heard it, or to pronounce when they saw it.

Pg 227

...when peace was declared... we certainly weren't going on running the Trans-Siberian Railway after the war was over. Bunny said that with a laugh, meaning it to be funny, and Ruth smiled, because it sounded funny to her; so innocent they were of the intricacies of world diplomacy, these two babes in the California woods!
Pg 237

"What is it you want to know?"
"Well, that's something you can't say; you don't know just what you'll get till you've got it. But I have a feeling, I want to know more about things."
Pg 238

...for when Dad saw a great number of people doing the same thing, he concluded it was something normal and safe.
Pg 239

About church
...he learned that one does not have to take ancient Hebrew mythology with vulgar literalness...
Pg 242

Eldon himself was an amateur patriot, in the proper sense of the abused word amateur...
Pg 259

Eldon pointed out that all this was merely camouflage, the convenient formulas whereby criminal conspiritors sought to cover themselves with a mantle of legality, "free speech" and "civil rights" and all the rest. The Soviet savages had repudiated all these principles, and it was our business to fight them with their own weapons.
Pg 259

Look to see if this is true
...the country was governed by a strange triumvirate- a catholic private secretary, an army doctor, and one of the most fashionably dressed of Washington society ladies.
Pg 263

...a student body which dumped into one common garbage-can Socialists and Communists and Syndicalists and Anarchists,...Pacifists, Pragmatists, Altruists, Vegetarians, Anti-vivisectionists and opponents of capital punishment.
Pg 266

...he had the idea that all kinds of people ought to know one another...
Pg 267

He found some of this in Henrietta Ashleigh, who knew exactly what was proper; and he found some more of it in Rachel Menzies, who knew exactly what was true, and said it with energy and frankness that were like flashes of lightning in the twilight of Southern Pacific culture.

The only trouble was... it appeared almost as if what was true was not proper and what was proper was not true!
Pg 267

Thr ruling classes in Japan were grabbing half a continent; but all the poor soldiers were grabbing was pay even poorer than mine. They didn't know what they were there for- they, also, had been kidnapped.... That was true of the Czecho-Slovaks, and Germans - every nation I met.... if the private soldiers could have talked it over there wouldn't have been any war. But that is what is known as treason, and if you try it you're shot.
Pg 272

...the only Boshevik atrocity that anyone knew about was the fundamental one of teaching the workers they had a right to rule the world.
Pg 275

It transvaluated all his values; things that had been wicked became suddenly heroic, while things that had been respectable became suddenly dull.
Pg 275

Some instinct warned him that the idea of expropriating the industries of Southern California would stand no chance with his class-mates...
Pg 277

...there was no use expecting his mind to work the same as Bunny's. Dad couldn't straighten out all the tangled in the world, and didn't feel the impulse to try.
Pg 278

At last it was printed; there lay the sheets, fresh from the press, soft and damp, like locusts newly emerged from the chrysalis.
Pg 280

"What they pay good money for they will read," said Papa Menzies, with proper Jewish insight; and his daughter added, with proper Socialist fervor, "if wereally believe in our cause, we won't mind a little ridicule." It was a call to martyrdom, and one after another they responded - though not without qualms.
Pg 281

...it chanced that a wagon loaded with blasting material, making its way through Wall Street with customary indifference to municipal ordinances, met with a collision and exploded.
Pg 283

Check to see if this really happened.

...facing the situation that if it was an accident it was nothing, while if it was a Bolshevik plot it was several hundred thousand dollars, took three minutes to look about him, and then pronounced it a plot.
Pg 283

A wave of witch-hunting swept the country, and other countries - for two or three years thereafter new discoveries would be made, and new "revelations" promised, and poor devils...would have... their testicles macerated, while eager newspaper readers in New York and Chicago and Angel City waited ravenously for promised thrills.
Pg 283

If they could connect the Bolshevik conspiracy in Southern Pacific University with the bomb explosion in Wall Street, they would have several hundred dollars' additional sales; while if they failed to make the connection, they would lose this amount to some more clever rival.
Pg 283

...dumped onto the floor, and trampled beneath the hop-nailed boots of patriotism.
Pg 284

...for Seager did not make his students write, " the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog," -no, siree, he gave them revolutionary propoganda that would send shivers down the spine of any patriot: "all men are created free and equal," or, more desperate yet, "Give me liberty or give me death!"
Pg 284

Being a rich man's son, he was accustomed to having his rights, and more.
Pg 285

Peter was commanded forthwith to recant his impoliteness to God, and he swore by God that he wouldn't...
Pg 285

...when you are bored, you can no longer keep up romantic imaginings about a girl.
Pg 288

"The world has got to have oil." But then, you looked at the world, and saw enormous crowds of people driving to places where they were no better off than at home!
Pg 292

...he now seemed like an old horse in a treadmill; he climbed and climbed, all day long, and at night he climbed in his dreams. But if you should let him out of the treadmill, he would die - for lack of any reason for living.
Pg 292 - 293

You could never be sure how much of it was acting, for he was sly as the devil, and not above using his arts on those he loved.
Pg 299.

He entered too easily into othe people's point of view.
Pg 301

It was a world in which some people worked all the time, and others played all the time. To work all the time was a bore, and no one would do it unless he had to; but to play all the time was equally a bore, and the people who did it never had anything to talk about that Bunny wanted to listen to. ...it seemed to him they must be exercising a kind of hypnosis upon themselved, to make themselves believe that they were really enjoying their lives.
Pg 302

...they even had slang words of their own, and the less possible it was for an outsider to understand them, the funnier they seemed to themselves.
Pg 304

"Oh, money, money, always money! We all of us have too much, and don't know how to buy happiness with it!"
Pg 306

He took them to an expensive restaurant - thinking to do them honor, and forgetting that they might feel uneasy as to their clothes and their table manners. Verily, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the feelings of the disinherited.
Pg 318

They were so noisy, and Bunny had such a prejudice in favor of quiet!
Pg 319

The business men of Angel City would want the radical movement to go to extremes, so that they might have an excuse to smash it; and when they wanted something to happen, they did not scruple to make it happen.
Pg 319

She said this without smiling; and Harvey Manning remarked, "You see, Ross, Annabelle has a literal mind."
Pg 323

She really liked you, and liked to have you around, and when she begged you to come back, she meant it.
324

To show off a show-place you need some one of an admiring disposition, whereas "Harve" had seen too many places, and was inclined to patronize them all.
Pg 325

We public idols are supposed to be rioting in luxury, but really we have only one dream - to buy enough Hollywood real estate so that we can retire and eat a square meal!

Pg 328

Conversation at this dinner-party, as at most dinner-parties in America at this time, resembled a walk along the edge of a slippery ditch. Sooner or later you were bound to slide in, and after that you could not get out, but finished your walk in the ditch.
Pg 329

Ther are two cries that one hears at Hollywood parties. The first is, I don't want to go to bed; and the second is, I do.
Pg 335

The world was so beautiful, and at the same time strange, and interesting to be alive in!
Pg337

Ruth persisted, with that surprising force that gentle people sometimes display.
Pg 346

She was several years older than he, and in knowledge of the world older than he would be at a hundred.
Pg 348

It was her business to be young in both body and spirit...
Pg 348

In ages past, in lands barbarian and civilized, the hardships of the ascetic life have been imposed upon women for many strange reasons; but was there ever one more freakish than this- that she might appear before the eyes of millions in the aspect of a terror-stricken virgin tearing herself from the hands of lustful ravishers!
Pg 348

She can be a good actress in the daytime, and a good mistress at night; the man can have both, and he takes them
Pg 350

By God, if having money means anything to me, it means I don't have to lie any more.
Pg 350

There is an old saying, that fingers were made before forks, and in the same way it is true that embraces were made a long time before words.
Pg 352

I want us to promise to be happy! Any time we can't be happy, let's quit, and not have any fuss! Let's be sensible, and not go crazy with jealousy, and torment each other.
Pg 353

If that means they give each other up, all right - but they've no business holding each other by lies. Will you make that bargain, Bunny?
Pg 353

...sisters always poisoned men against sweethearts. But Bunny laughed and said he had plenty of antitoxins agaist Bertie
Pg 355

Rushing about in a panic, trying to put things away from the sight of this alarmingly fashionable visitor.
Pg 357

The city council passed an anti-picketting ordinance, which forbade anyone to even make an ugly face in front of a place where there was a strike. Since not all the clothing workers had faces of natural beauty, there was much infringement of this law...
Pg 359

Bunny went over to the dingy old building which had been erected to serve a city of fifty thousand, and was now serving one of a million.

pg 361

The old building was cracked, and had been condemned as a menace to life by half a dozen successive commissions; nevertheless, here it was, a monument to the greed of real estate speculators, who cared nothing about a city's good name, provided only its tax-rate were low.
pg 361

She never told him the reason - no, her idea of truth-telling did not go that far! She let him think it was because of his overwhelming charms, and his male egotism was satisfied with the explanation.
Pg 365

There was no cloud in the sky of their happiness; except just one little cloud, no bigger than a man's hand! Bunny did not see it at all; and the woman saw it for an instant or so, and then looked the other way. Oh, surely the rose will bloom forever!
Pg 366

It was necessary to persuade the American people that the Democratic administration for the past eight years had been wasteful and corrupt, ignorant and fatuous - and that was easy enough. But also, it was necessary to persuade them that an administration by Senator Harding was likely to be better - and that was not so easy.
Pg 376

...for the more money that passed through their hands, the larger the amount that would stick.
Pg 376

Man is a gregarious animal, and it is hard not to do what everybody you know is doing!
Pg 379

And when he said something about it's being cowardly to run away, she made a strinking reply. "We're going to have roast spring lamb for dinner, but you didn't consider it necessary to visit the slaughter-house."
Pg 387

How did one travel with one's mistress, in this "land of the pilgrim's pride?"
Pg 387

They saw the world premiere of "Come-hither Eyes." Possibly you have never been to college in America, and do not understand our lively ways of speech; so let it be explained that sometimes the eyes of "co-eds" have been observed to possess, whether from natural endowment or by practice acquired, a certain quality suggestive to the male creature of an impulse to proximity. A delicious title, you see; and a delicious picture transporting tired and bored millions into the very same world of glorious money-spending to which Vee and Bunny had been lifted up. The mechanic who had been screwing up nut number 847 in an automobile factory all day, the housewife who had been washing baby-diapers and buying shoddy goods in a five and ten cent store - these were placed in the same position as Dad, enjoying a vicarious jag with no hang-over the next morning!

Pg 389

That was the trouble in dealing with politicians; you bought them before election, and then you had to buy them again after election...
Pg 392

...I simply have to know all about love, and how can I learn if I don't practice?
Pg 400

Bunny would get the contents of the tutor's mind, and Vee would get the contents of his heart, and they would send him home like a squeezed orange. It appealed to Dad as good business.
Pg 401

Men and women are not bodies only, and cannot be satisfied with delights of the body only. Men ans women are minds, and hace to have harmony of ideas. Can they be bored with each other's ideas, and still be just as much in love.
Pg 413

...the Menzies boys got off, and the party held a celebration, which was described in the newspapers as an orgy of red revolutionary raving.
Pg 424

I just can't let my love for any one person in the world take the place of my sense of justice.
Pg 430

Poor old man, in his secret heart he was proud of the kid's nerve!
Pg 430

Well, he's a practical man, and I've a great respect for him. He wants to do something, and he finds out the way, and he does it.
Pg 432

It was part of the proverbial intuitive powers of woman, that she will be able to say exactly how an aristocrat will look and act, even though she has never been outside the state of California, and never laid eyes upon a single aristocrat in all her fifty years.
Pg 435

...yet they seemed to be always having violent emotional crises, and having to make it up with tears.
Pg 436

Southern California is populated for the most part by retired farmers from the middle west, who hace come out to die amid sunshine and flowers. Of course they want to die happy, and with the assurance of sunshine and flowers beyond; so Angel City is the home of more weird cults and doctrines...
Pg 437

In the first place, he had been a real shepherd of flocks and herds, and there are age-old traditions attaching to this profession. Also it was symbolically useful...
Pg 437

Science had just completed a marvelous invention; the human voice became magnified a hundred million fold, it could be spread over the whole earth. The population of America had gone wild over radio, and everybody had rushed to get a set. The first great public use made of this achievement in Angel City was to open a new three million dollar hotel for the pleasure of the very rich, and the opening ceremonies were broadcasted, and the newspapers were full of the wonder of it; but it proved to be dreadful, because everybody in the hotel got drunk, and the manager of the institution placed himself in front of the microphone and poured out a stream of obscenities such as farmer' wives from Iowa had never dreamed in all their lives. So it was felt that the new invention needed to be sanctified and redeemed...
pg 439

Did Dad really believe that? It was hard for Bunny to be sure. Dad had lies that he told to the public; and perhaps he had others that he told to his son; and yet others that he told to himself. If you laid hold of him and tore all those lies away, he would not be able to stand the sight of his nakedness.
Pg 440

He was so prone to see the other fellow's point of view, and lose himself in that!
Pg 444

A curious superstition, that when things were said in Congress, even the most respectable newspapers found it necessary to mention them. Such things brought politics into disrepute with business men.
Pg 455

...the committee proceeded to put witnesses on the stand and "grill" them - a terrifying newspaper phrase, but really it was not so much a culinary operation as an explosion, with the debris scattered all over the front pages of the press.
Pg 458

The savings that intelligent business men effected always made up many times over for what profits the business men took.
Pg 463

..."Old spats and monocle," as he called Great Britain's leading oil magnate...
Pg 465

Bertie said that settled it, he would never meet the Prince de This and the Duchesse de That, and Bunny was so ignorant, he didn't know what he was missing.
Pg 468

Dad had unutterable contempt for these people, they weren't even crude and healthy, like the rich in California, no, they were rotten to the core, vicious and terrible people. The ex-mule-driver took one look into their gilded gambling palace, that was famed all over the world, and he went outside and spit on the steps - faugh! He was willing to consider Bunny's argument, that such people were made by generations of hereditary privilege; let things go as they were going in California, and Dad's grand-children would be giving this crowd lessons in depravitgy. For that matter, some of them were giving it now right here on the Riviera - rich Americans setting the pace in frivolity and ostentation.

Anyhow, said Dad, give him Americans! He wandered out and found a retired department store prorietor from Des Moines, just as desperately bored as himself, and the two would sit for hours on the esplanade and tell about their business and their troubles. Presently there was add....
pg 470

The world grows one, and it is the "cinéma-mélodrame de la Société" that is doing it - which is to say the world grows American.
Pg 479

....perfect roads, beautiful scenery, humble peasantry standing cap in hand and awestricken, servants rushing to wait upon them at every stop. All Europe owes us money, and this is how it pays.
Pg 480

...Paris; a city which was exhibiting to the world the moral collapse of capitalist imperialism. In the theatres of this cultural centre you might see a stage crowded with naked women, their bodies painted every color of the rainbow; some of them died of the poisoning which this treatment inflicted upon the system, but meantime the war for democracy was justified.
Pg 484

Ruth has had to learn that the world is the way it is, and not they way she'd like it to be.
Pg 490

Some people hate the radical movement because they don't understand it, and some because they do.
Pg 490

Yes, he would forgive her, so he wired in reply, and might whoever had made them forgive them all!
Pg 499

...American big businessmen all purchased government, they all justified the purchase of government. It was something that had shocked Dan in the beginning, but he had come to realize now that it was a system; without the purchase of government, American big business could not exist.
Pg 501
This is still true, but they system of buying the government has changed. Now it is through the creation of above board laws and manipulation of people to encourage government intrusion into the lives of people or lack thereof instead of purchasing individual politicians.

From which Bunny made note that death-bed repentances do not last very long - at least not when it's another person's death-bed!
Pg 502

It was a curious thing - the nature of women! They seemed so gentle and impressionable; but it was the pliability of rubber, or of water - that comes right back the way it was before!
Pg 506

Like all young society ladies, she set much store by the freshness of her skin and its freedom from wrinkles; but now she was throwing away her charms, and making herself pale and haggard.
pg 509

...money by itself is nothing, to accomplish anything takes money plus management.
Pg 511

...Rachel was nervous when he drove fast, because the gods are jealous of such rapture as hers.
Pg 525

He had been a treasure of oil that, widely drilled, would have lasted thirty years: but now the whole field was "on the pump," and hundreds of wells producing so little that it no longer paid to pump them. One sixth of the oil had been saved, and five-sixth had been wasted!

That was you blessed "competition," which they taught you to love and honor in economics classes!
pg 526

...there were men up in Angel City who had become mighty magnates by employing thousands of men and women slaves, to transcribe and check and recheck and look up and record literally millions of documents like these!
Pg 528

He could not sleep. So, lying a-bed in the hotel-room, he explained ti to her; how Paul had come when Bunny was groping for something different and better in his life. Paul had given him an ideal - something stern and hard - self-sufficiency, independence of judgment, determination to face life and understand it, and not be drawn away in pursuit of money or pleasure. Bunny had not been able to follow that ideal - no, he had lived in luxury, and gone chasing after women; but he had had the vision, the longing to be like Paul.

And then, at each new crisis in his life, Paul would come along, a sort of standard by which Bunny could measure himself and what he was doing, and realize how little success he was having. ... Now the light was out, and Bunny would have to see by his own feeble lantern!

Pg 534

At first the exposers had made some headway, the people seemed to care. But the enemy was only waiting for the time to strike. In the last 3 weeks of the campaign he turned loose his reserves, and it was like a vast cloud of hornets, the sky black with a swarm of stinging, burning, poisoning lies!

It was the money of... all those who had something to gain by the purchase of government , or something to lose by failure to purchase. Another fifty million dollar campaign... there was a committee for the distribution of terror. The great central factories where it was manufactured were in Washington and New York, and the product was shipped out wholesale, all over the land, and circulated by every agency...
Pg 535

...he sat in a deep wicker chair in front of his radio set, and proceeded to explore the circumambient ether.
Pg 538

They would break into ejaculations at every pause in the prophe's word...
Pg 539

The radio is a one-sided institution; you can listen, but you cannot answer back. In that lies its enormous usefulness to the capitalist system. The householder sits at home and takes what is handed to him, like an infant being fed through a tube. It is a basis upon which to build the greatest slave empire in history.
Pg 539

"Ah had some one befoah Ah had you
An' Ah'll have someone aftah you's gone,
A street car or a sweethear doan' mattah to me,
There'll be another one comin' along!"
Pg 542

Six or seven years ago the people of the United States in their sovereign wisdom had passed a law forbidding the sale of alcoholic liquor for beverage purposes. But the advocates of the law and order reserve to themselves the privilege of deciding which laws they will obey, and the prohibition act is not among them. All ruling class America celebrates its political victories by getting drunk.
Pg 542

The householder next door was a workingman, or clerk, or such humble being, denied the royal privilege of breaking the law at ten dollars a quart for gin and thirty for champagne. But he could sit here till after midnight, and turn from one studio to another, and enjoy a series of vicarious jags. "Radio VXZ, the main dining-room of the Admiralty Hotel." A chanteuse from the Grand Guignol in Paris was singing a ballad, and you could hear the laughter of those who understood the obscenity, and those who pretended to understand it, and those who were too drunk to understand anything but how to laugh.
Pg 542

And from there they would be swept to the ballroom of the Emperor Hotel, Angel City, Radio RWKY, the Angel City Patriot broadcasting by direct control. Or was it to the heart of the Congo, where the naked savages danced to the music of the tom-tom, their black bodies, smeared with palm oil, shining in the light of blazing fires? For a hundred centuries these savages had paddled the river, and never to the mind of one of them had come the thought of an engine; they had stood on the shores of mighty lakes, and never dreamed a sail. The weight of nature's blind fecundity rested upon them, stifling their minds. And now capitalist civilization, rushing to destruction with the speed of its fastest battle-planes, cast about to find a form of expression for its irresistible will to degeneracy, and chose the tomtom of the Congo for its music, all the belly-dances of the Congo for its exercise, and so here was America, Land of Jazz.
Pg 544

Interesting that he isn't above racism to make his point. Also, he really hates jazz.

Yes, the announcer was drunk, the very radio was drunk, the instruments would not send the wave-lengths true, the there could not carry them straight, they wavered and wiggled; the laws of the physical universe had gone staggering, God was drunk on His Throne, so pleased by the election of the greatesh man ever in White Housh.
Pg 546