“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
Source: I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked (1935), ; repr. University of California Press, 1994, p. 109.
Context: I used to say to our audiences: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
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Upton Sinclair 50
American novelist, writer, journalist, political activist 1878–1968Related quotes
September 19, 1777, p. 351, often misquoted as being hanged in the morning.
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol III
Source: The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. Vol 3
Introduction to Treasury of the Free World (1946)
“There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other.”
Context: It has an unhappy effect upon the human understanding and temper, for a man to be compelled in his gravest investigation of an argument, to consider, not what is true, but what is convenient. The lawyer never yet existed who has not boldly urged an objection which he knew to be fallacious, or endeavoured to pass off a weak reason for a strong one. Intellect is the greatest and most sacred of all endowments; and no man ever trifled with it, defending an action to-day which he had arraigned yesterday, or extenuating an offence on one occasion, which, soon after, he painted in the most atrocious colours, with absolute impunity. Above all, the poet, whose judgment should be clear, whose feelings should be uniform and sound, whose sense should be alive to every impression and hardened to none, who is the legislator of generations and the moral instructor of the world, ought never to have been a practising lawyer, or ought speedily to have quitted so dangerous an engagement.
The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer vol. 1, p. 370 (1803)
Source: Sex and Character (1903), p. 105.
The Nature, Importance and Liberties of Belief (1873)
Context: Now, evidence to a man is that which convinces his mind. It varies with different men. An argument to a man who cannot reason is no evidence. Facts are no evidence to a man who cannot perceive them. A sentimental appeal is evidence to a man whose very nature moves by emotion, though it may not be to his neighbor.
So then, when men come to the investigation of truth, they are responsible, first, for research, for honesty therein, for being diligent, and for attempting to cleanse their minds from all bias of selfishness and pride. They are responsible for sincerity and faithfulness in the investigation of truth. And when they go beyond that to the use of their faculties, the combination of those faculties will determine very largely, not, perhaps, the generic nature of truth, but specific developments of it. And as long as the world stands there will be men who will hold that God is a God of infinite love and sympathy and. goodness with a residunm of justice; and there will be men who will believe that God is a God of justice with a residunm of love and sympathy and goodness; and each will follow the law of his own mind. As a magnet, drawn through a vessel containing sand and particles of iron, attracts the particles of iron but does not attract the sand; so the faculties of a man's mind appropriate certain facts and reject others. What is evidence to a man will depend upon those of his faculties whk at work upon the things which are presented as evidence.
The Usurpation Of Language (1910)