JOHN STEINBECK
The Grapes of Wrath

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our successes. The fertile Earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And the children dying of hunger must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates - died of malnutrition - because the food must rot if not sold at a profit. In the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

JOHN STEINBECK
Travels With Charley: In Search of America

A number of years ago I had some experience with being alone. For two succeeding years I was alone each winter for eight months at a stretch in the Sierra Nevada mountains on Lake Tahoe. I was the caretaker on a summer estate during the winter months when it was snowed in. And I made some observations then. As time went on I found that my reactions thickened. Ordinarily I am a whistler. I stopped whistling. I stopped conversing with my dogs, and I believe that the subtleties of feeling began to disappear until finally I was on a pleasure-pain basis. Then it occurred to me that the delicate shades of feeling, of reaction, are the result of communication, and without such communication they tend to disappear. A man with nothing to say has no words. Can its reverse be true- a man who has no one to say anything to has no words as he has no need for words?

JOHN STEINBECK
The Grapes of Wrath

Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

JOHN STEINBECK

The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights

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Somewhere in the world there is a defeat for everyone. Some are destroyed by defeat, and some made small and mean by victory. Greatness lives in one who triumphs equally over defeat and victory.

THE WAYWARD BUS

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Victor Vicas

USA, 1957

BERTRAND RUSSELL

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In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.

JOHN STEINBECK

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Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

JOHN STEINBECK
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Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

JOHN STEINBECK

We work in our own darkness a great deal with little real knowledge of what we are doing.

JOHN STEINBECK

Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.