Top 100 Sinclair Lewis Quotes
#1. All the Utopias - Brook Farm, Robert Owen's sanctuary of chatter, Upton Sinclair's Helicon Hall - and their regulation end in scandal, feuds, poverty, griminess, disillusion.
Sinclair Lewis
#2. Do you think it's so snobbish, to want to see something besides one's fellow citizens abroad?
Sinclair Lewis
#3. On the walk, like shredded lovely flesh, were the petals of the last gallant rose.
Sinclair Lewis
#4. Isn't there perhaps something the matter with you and me? (May I join you in the honor of having something the matter?)" "(Yes, thanks.) No, I think it's the town.
Sinclair Lewis
#5. What is love? It is the morning and the evening star.
Sinclair Lewis
#6. HIS march to greatness was not without disastrous stumbling.
Sinclair Lewis
#7. The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.
Sinclair Lewis
#8. In everything was the spirit of children's play - not the rule-ridden, time-killing play of adults that is a preparation for death, but the busy and credulous play of children that is a preparation for life.
Sinclair Lewis
#9. The shame of emotion overpowered them; they cursed a little, to prove they were good rough fellows; and in a mellow silence, Babbitt whistling while Paul hummed, they paddled back to the hotel.
Sinclair Lewis
#10. When audiences come to see us authors lecture, it is largely in the hope that we'll be funnier to look at than to read.
Sinclair Lewis
#12. He had, in fact, got everything from the church and Sunday School, except, perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason
Sinclair Lewis
#13. Thus Carol hit upon the tragedy of old age, which is not that it is less vigorous than youth, but that it is not needed by youth ...
Sinclair Lewis
#15. No matter even if you are cold, I like you better than anybody in the world. One time I said that you were my soul. And that still goes. You're all the things that I see in a sunset when I'm driving in from the country, the things that I like but can't make poetry of.
Sinclair Lewis
#16. Why, America's the only free nation on earth. Besides! Country's too big for a revolution. No, no! Couldn't happen here!
Sinclair Lewis
#17. Whatever poet, orator or sage may say of it, old age is still old age.
Sinclair Lewis
#18. World." "I love her for being so happy," Carol brooded. "I ought to be that way. I worship the baby, but the housework - Oh, I suppose I'm fortunate; so much better off than farm-women on a new clearing, or people in a slum." It
Sinclair Lewis
#19. Life is comfortable and clean enough here already. And so secure. What it needs it to be less secure, more eager.
Sinclair Lewis
#20. It's one of our favorite American myths that broad plains necessarily make broad minds, and high mountains make high purpose.
Sinclair Lewis
#21. To the connoisseur of scenes, nothing is more enjoyable than a thorough, melodramatic, egoistic humility.
Sinclair Lewis
#22. And though he had almost flunked in Greek, his thesis on 'Sixteen Ways of Paying a Church Debt' had won the ten-dollar prize in Practical Theology.
Sinclair Lewis
#23. Never was a Family more insistent on learning one another's movements than were the Bunch. All of them volubly knew, or indignantly desired to know, where all the others had been every minute of the week.
Sinclair Lewis
#24. In matrimonial geography the distance between the first mute recognition of a break and the admission thereof is as great as the distance between the first naive faith and the first doubting.
Sinclair Lewis
#25. When you think that most of us are doomed by divine grace to roast in hell, to say nothing of mortgages and hail and bad crops and extravagant womenfolks, 'tain't any laughing matter!
Sinclair Lewis
#26. There are dozens of young poets and fictioneers most of them a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce, who, however insane they may be, have refused to be genteel and traditional and dull.
Sinclair Lewis
#27. She wanted, just now, to have a cell in a settlement-house, like a nun without the bother of a black robe, and be kind, and read Bernard Shaw, and enormously improve a horde of grateful poor.
Sinclair Lewis
#28. A country that tolerates evil means- evil manners, standards of ethics-for a generation, will be so poisoned that it never will have any good end.
Sinclair Lewis
#29. The Wonderlust
probably it's a worse affliction than the Wanderlust.
Sinclair Lewis
#31. There was much conversation, most of which sounded like the rest of it.
Sinclair Lewis
#32. More and more, as I think about history, I am convinced that everything that is worth while in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever.
Sinclair Lewis
#33. freedom of speech becomes mere license when it goes so far as to criticize the Army, differ with the D.A.R., and advocate the rights of the Mob.
Sinclair Lewis
#34. Don't be a writer. Writing is an escape from something. You be a scientist.
Sinclair Lewis
#35. She laughed at herself when she saw that she had expected to be at once a heretic and a returned hero; she was very reasonable and merry about it; and it hurt just as much as ever.
Sinclair Lewis
#36. Reading old Gray? That's right. Physician's library just three books: 'Gray's Anatomy' and Bible and Shakespeare. Study. You may become great doctor.
Sinclair Lewis
#37. She was snatched back from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main Street.
Sinclair Lewis
#38. Street, and she was able to give Elmer the three hundred
Sinclair Lewis
#39. In my opinion, what the country needs, first and foremost, is a good, sound, business-like conduct of its affairs. What we need is - a business administration !
Sinclair Lewis
#40. The handsome dining room of the Hotel Wessex, with its gilded plaster shields and the mural depicting the Green Mountains, had been reserved for the Ladies' Night Dinner of the Fort Beulah Rotary Club.
Sinclair Lewis
#41. Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won't be for another thousand years?
Sinclair Lewis
#42. I wouldn't care whether it was a laboratory or a carnival. But it's merely safe. Tell me, Mr. Pollock, what is the matter with Gopher Prairie?
Sinclair Lewis
#43. Whatever she might become she would never be static.
Sinclair Lewis
#44. I wrote 'It Can't Happen Here,' but I began to think it certainly can.
Sinclair Lewis
#45. Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement of ignorance which is so easy to come by. To be 'intellectual' or 'artistic' or, in their own word, to be 'highbrow,' is to be priggish and of dubious virtue.
Sinclair Lewis
#46. In fact, the whole thing about prohibition is this: it isn't the initial cost, it's the humidity.
Sinclair Lewis
#47. Lead an almost irritatingly pure life, but who had no
Sinclair Lewis
#48. Why is it that traveling Americans are always so dreadful?
Sinclair Lewis
#49. Fine, large, meaningless, general terms like romance and business can always be related. They take the place of thinking, and are highly useful to optimists and lecturers.
Sinclair Lewis
#50. For many minutes, for many hours, for a bleak eternity, he lay awake, shivering, reduced to primitive terror, comprehending that he had won freedom, and wondering what he could do with anything so unknown and so embarrassing as freedom.
Sinclair Lewis
#51. And when Elmer was about to slip out to the kitchen with her to make lemonade, Benham held him by demanding, 'What do you think of John Wesley's doctrine of perfection?'
'Oh, it's absolutely sound and proven,' admitted Elmer, wondering what the devil Mr. Wesley's doctrine of perfection might be.
Sinclair Lewis
#52. There is no Solution! There will never be a state of society anything like perfect!
Sinclair Lewis
#53. Day on day he waited. So much of a revolution for so many people
is nothing but waiting. That is one reason why tourists rarely see
anything but contentment in a crushed population. Waiting, and its
brother death, seem so contented.
Sinclair Lewis
#54. The fact that none of these civic worriers had ever heard of such a case was unimportant, because they all had heard of somebody who had heard of it!
Sinclair Lewis
#55. It is, I think, an error to believe that there is any need of religion to make life seem worth living.
Sinclair Lewis
#56. Since dictating the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to explain it, God has never done much but creep around and try to catch us disobeying it.
Sinclair Lewis
#57. Going seventy miles an hour but not going anywhere - not enough imagination to want to go anywhere! Getting their music by turning a dial. Getting their phrases from the comic strips instead of from Shakespeare and the Bible and Veblen and Old Bill Sumner. Pap-fed flabs!
Sinclair Lewis
#58. and after saying good-by to him at the station, Babbitt returned to his office to realize that he faced a world which, without Paul, was meaningless.
Sinclair Lewis
#60. I can not understand why ministers presume to deliver sermons every week at appointed hours because it is humanly impossible for inspirations to come with clock-like regularity
Sinclair Lewis
#61. Thus it came to him merely to run away was folly, because he could never run away from himself.
Sinclair Lewis
#62. So much of a revolution for so many people is nothing but waiting. That is one reason why tourists rarely see anything but contentment in a crushed population.
Sinclair Lewis
#63. Life is hard and astonishingly complicated ... No one great reform will make it easy. Most of us who work
or want to work
will always have trouble or discontent. So we must learn to be calm, and train all our faculties, and make others happy.
Sinclair Lewis
#64. People will buy anything that is 'one to a customer.'
Sinclair Lewis
#66. It might be the doing of Satan, in whom Aaron anxiously believed with all of his being except, perhaps, his mind.
Sinclair Lewis
#67. What are these unheard of sins you condemn so much - and like so well?
Sinclair Lewis
#69. A sensational event was changing from the brown suit to the gray the contents of his pockets. He was earnest about these objects. They were of eternal importance, like baseball or the Republican Party.
Sinclair Lewis
#70. Elmer Gantry never knew who set him thirty dimes, wrapped in a tract about holiness, nor why. But he found the sentiments in the tract useful in his sermon, and the thirty dimes he spent for lovely photographs of burlesque ladies.
Sinclair Lewis
#71. government of the profits, by the profits, for the profits.
Sinclair Lewis
#72. Like every thoughtful parent in every age of history, Neil consoled himself, My generation failed, but this new one is going to change the entire world, and go piously to the polls even on rainy election-days, and never drink more than one cocktail, and end all war.
Sinclair Lewis
#73. Babbit was an average father. He was affectionate, bullying, opinionated, ignorant, and rather wistful. Like most parents he enjoyed the game of waiting till the victim was clearly wrong, then virtuously pouncing.
Sinclair Lewis
#74. He was in stature but a small man, yet remember that so were Napoleon, Lord Beaverbrook, Stephen A. Douglas, Frederick the Great, and the Dr. Goebbels who is privily known throughout Germany as Wotan's Mickey Mouse.
Sinclair Lewis
#75. He called himself an "agnostic" instead of an "atheist" only because he detested the street-bawling, tract-peddling evangelicism of the professional atheists.
Sinclair Lewis
#76. She had so painfully reared three sons to be Christian gentlemen that one of them had become an Omaha bartender, one a professor of Greek, and one, Cyrus N. Bogart, a boy of fourteen who was still at home, the most brazen member of the toughest gang in Boytown.
Sinclair Lewis
#77. He had learned how to assemble Jewish texts, Greek philosophy, and Middle-Western evangelistic anecdotes into a sermon. And he had learned that poverty was blessed, but that bankers make the best deacons.
Sinclair Lewis
#78. That nation is proudest and noblest and most exalted which has the greatest number of really great men.
Sinclair Lewis
#80. It is impossible to discourage the real writers - they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write.
Sinclair Lewis
#81. He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all.
Sinclair Lewis
#82. Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know she is better than every other country.
Sinclair Lewis
#85. The men leaned back on their heels, put their hands in their trousers-pockets, and proclaimed their views with the booming profundity of a prosperous male repeating a thoroughly hackneyed statement about a matter of which he knows nothing whatever.
Sinclair Lewis
#86. Unhappy women are given to protecting their sensitiveness by cynical gossip, by whining, by high-church and new-thought religions, or by a fog of vagueness.
Sinclair Lewis
#87. Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest; it is an industry.
Sinclair Lewis
#88. Your lips are for songs about rivers in the morning and lakes at twilight.
Sinclair Lewis
#89. Well, if that's what you call being at peace, for heaven's sake just warn me before you go to war, will you?
Sinclair Lewis
#90. If travel were so inspiring and informing a business ... then the wisest men in the world would be deck hands on tramp steamers, Pullman porters, and Mormon missionaries.
Sinclair Lewis
#91. Writing is just work-there's no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type or write with your toes-it's still just work.
Sinclair Lewis
#92. Funny how the world always praises its opera-singers so much and pays 'em so well and then starves its shoemakers, and yet it needs good shoes so much more than it needs opera
or war or fiction.
Sinclair Lewis
#93. Is it just possible,' he sighed, 'that the most vigorous and obldest idealists have been the worst enemies of human progress instead of its greatest creators?
Sinclair Lewis
#94. I have for myself no conceivable complaint to make, and yet for American literature in general, and its standing in a country where industrialism and finance and science flourish and the only arts that are vital and respected are architecture and the film, I have a considerable complaint.
Sinclair Lewis
#95. The Maker of the universe with stars a hundred thousand light-years apart was interested, furious, and very personal about it if a small boy played baseball on Sunday afternoon.
Sinclair Lewis
#96. You," Said Dr. Yavitch, "are a middle-road liberal, and you haven't the slightest idea what you want. I, being a revolutionist, know exactly what I want
and what I want now is a drink.
Sinclair Lewis
#97. cigar, and walked up and down before the house, a portly,
Sinclair Lewis
#98. Realized that this country has gone so flabby that any gang daring enough and unscrupulous enough, and smart enough not to seem illegal, can grab hold of the entire government and have all the power and applause and salutes, all the money and palaces and willin' women they want.
Sinclair Lewis
#99. On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy has given the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had.
Sinclair Lewis
#100. He loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons.
Sinclair Lewis
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