The Jungle quotes

“They use everything about the hog except the squeal.”

— Spoken by a character · Chapter III

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.

The great corporation which employed you lied to you, and lied to the whole country—from top to bottom it was nothing but one gigantic lie.

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; though there are a few other things that are great among us including our drink-bill, which is a billion and a quarter of dollars a year, and doubling itself every decade.

one of the necessary accompaniments of capitalism in a democracy is political corruption; and one of the consequences of civic administration by ignorant and vicious politicians, is that preventable diseases kill off half our population.

— Schliemann · Chapter XXXI

Can you not see that the task is your task—yours to dream, yours to resolve, yours to execute?

— Spoken by a character · Chapter XXVIII

As if political liberty made wage slavery any the more tolerable!

To do that would mean, not merely to be defeated, but to acknowledge defeat—and the difference between these two things is what keeps the world going.

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 been able to get a decent existence for their bodies?

There is no wilderness where I can hide from these things, there is no haven where I can escape them; though I travel to the ends of the earth, I find the same accursed system—I find that all the fair and noble impulses of humanity, the dreams of poets and the agonies of martyrs, are shackled and bound in the service of organized and predatory Greed!

— Spoken by a character · Chapter XXVIII

This was in truth not living; it was scarcely even existing, and they felt that it was too little for the price they paid.

Government oppressed the body of the wage-slave, but Religion oppressed his mind, and poisoned the stream of progress at its source.

The great packing machine ground on remorselessly, without thinking of green fields; and the men and women and children who were part of it never saw any green thing, not even a flower.

They are penned up in filthy houses and left to rot and stew in misery, and the conditions of their life make them ill faster than all the doctors in the world could heal them; and so, of course, they remain as centers of contagion, poisoning the lives of all of us, and making happiness impossible for even the most selfish.

— Schliemann · Chapter XXXI