Sinclair Lewis famous quotes

When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#America #Religion #Flags

It is impossible to discourage the real writers - they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Real #Writing #Giving

Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know she is better than every other country.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Country #4th Of July #Patriotic

The trouble with this country is that there are too many people going about saying, "The trouble with this country is...."
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Country #People #Blame

Sleep with me sleep with my dogs-
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Dog #Sleep #My Dog

Winter is not a season, it's an occupation.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Inspirational #Winter #Occupation

What is love? It is the morning and the evening star.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Love #Morning #Stars

Writers have a rare power not given to anyone else: we can bore people long after we are dead.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Writing #Long #People

Writers kid themselves-about themselves and other people. Take the talk about writing methods. Writing is just work-there's no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type with your toes-it is just work.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Kids #Writing #People

Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Kings #Men #Long

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

#Looks #Lectures #Audience

Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Money #Way #Advertising

We'd get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Sick #Cookies

NOW is a fact that cannot be dodged.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Facts

It isn't what you earn but how spend it that fixes your class.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Class

She was snatched back from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main Street.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Dream #Country #Main Street

People read fiction for emotion-not information
-- Sinclair Lewis

#People #Information #Fiction

People will buy anything that is one to a customer.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Funny Inspirational #People

It is, I think, an error to believe that there is any need of religion to make life seem worth living.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Atheist #Believe #Thinking

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

#Travel #Half #Littles

He loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#People #Misanthropy #Persons

It is one of the major tragedies that nothing is more discomforting than the hearty affection of the Old Friends who never were friends.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Old Friends #Tragedy #Affection

There are two insults which no human being will endure: The assertion that he hasn't a sense of humor, and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Two #Sense Of Humor #Insult

Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Education #Literature #Cold

The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Class #Barbarians #Century

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

#Baseball #Stars #Sunday

She did her work with the thoroughness of a mind which reveres details and never quite understands them.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Mind #Details #Thoroughness

The cocktail filled him with a whirling exhilaration behind which he was aware of devastating desires—to rush places in fast motors, to kiss girls, to sing, to be witty. ... He perceived that he had gifts of profligacy which had been neglected. —chapter 8
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Girl #Witty #Kissing

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

#Ideas #Want #Drs

You're so earnest about morality that I hate to think how essentially immoral you must be underneath.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Hate #Thinking #Morality

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

#Tragedy #Youth #Carols

I think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We're tired of drudging and sleeping and dying. We're tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We're tired of always deferring hope till the next generation. We're tired of hearing politicians and priests and cautious reformers... coax us, 'Be calm! Be patient! Wait! We have the plans for a Utopia already made; just wiser than you.' For ten thousand years they've said that. We want our Utopia now — and we're going to try our hands at it.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Tired #Sleep #Thinking

Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Contentment #World #Misery

I must say I'm not very fond of oratory that's so full of energy it hasn't any room for facts.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Rooms #Facts #Energy

Think how much better it is to criticize conventional customs if you yourself live up to them, scrupulously.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Thinking #Criticize

Curiously, neither God nor the devil may wear modern dress, but must retain Grecian vestments.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Devil #Dresses #May

There are so many people in the world who are eager to do for you things that you do not wish done, provided only that you will do for them things that you don't wish to do.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#People #Wish #Done

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

#Race #Perfect #Trying

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

#Country #Art #Literature

If travel were so inspiring and informing a business ... then the wisest men in the world would be deck hands on tramp steamers.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Men #Hands #World

The greatest mystery about a human being is not his reaction to sex or praise, but the manner in which he contrives to put in twenty-four hours a day. It is this which puzzles the longshoreman about the clerk, the Londoner about the bushman.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Sex #Clerks #Four

I have faith in Faith, I have reverence for all true Reverence.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Have Faith #Reverence

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

#Thinking #Romance #Fine

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. But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and silencing them forever.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Men #Forever #Important

Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn "reasonable" and become your enemies, one quarter are afraid to speak, and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed final quarter keep you alive.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Blessed #Enemy #Alive

Vast is the power of cities to reclaim the wanderer.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Cities

Don't be a writer. Writing is an escape from something. You be a scientist.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Writing #Scientist

That nation is proudest and noblest and most exalted which has the greatest number of really great men.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Men #Numbers #Great Men

The world and all its wisdom is but a booby, blundering school-boy that needs management and could be managed, if men and women would be human beings instead of just business men, or plumbers, or army officers, or commuters, or educators, or authors, or clubwomen, or traveling salesmen, or Socialists, or Republicans, or Salvation Army leaders, or wearers of cloths.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#School #Army #Boys

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

#War #Shoes #Ems

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

#Fog #Gossip #Cynical

I was brought up to believe that the Christian God wasn't a scared and compromising public servant, but the creator of the whole merciless truth, and I reckon that training spoiled me -- I actually took my teachers seriously!
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Christian #Teacher #Believe

A village in a country which is taking pains to become altogether standardized and pure, which aspires to succeed Victorian England as the chief mediocrity of the world, is no longer merely provincial, no longer downy and restful in its leaf-shadowed ignorance. It is a force seeking to conquer the earth... Sure of itself, it bullies other civilizations, as a traveling salesman in a brown derby conquers the wisdom of China and tacks advertisements of cigarettes over arches for centuries dedicated to the sayings of Confucius.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Country #Pain #Ignorance

The one thing that can be more disconcerting than intelligent hatred is demanding love.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Intelligent #Hatred

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

#Thinking #Laughing #Grace

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

#Life Is Hard #Reform #Want

Fortune has dealt with me rather too well. I have known little struggle, not much poverty, many generosities. Now and then I have, for my books or myself, been somewhat warmly denounced -- there was one good pastor in California who upon reading my Elmer Gantry desired to lead a mob and lynch me, while another holy man in the state of Maine wondered if there was no respectable and righteous way of putting me in jail.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Struggle #Book #Reading

Indians, of course, have no "theology," and indeed no word for the system of credulity in which the white priests arrange for God, who must be entirely bewildered by it, a series of excuses for his failures.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#White #Excuse #Priests

So much in a revolution is nothing but waiting.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Waiting #Revolution

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

#Writing #Secret #Use

Upon this theology he rarely pondered. The kernel of his practical religion was that it was respectable, and beneficial to one's business, to be seen going to services; that the church kept the Worst Elements from being still worse; and that the pastor's sermons, however dull they might seem at the time of taking, yet had a voodooistic power which 'did a fellow good-- kept him in touch with Higher Things.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Past #Church #Elements

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

#Insane #Dozen #Dull

Damn the great executives, the men of measured merriment, damn the men with careful smiles, damn the men that run the shops, oh, damn their measured merriment.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Running #Men #He Man

Being a man given to oratory and high principles, he enjoyed the sound of his own vocabulary and the warmth of his own virtue.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Men #Vocabulary #Principles

When fascism comes to the United States it will be wrapped in the American flag and will claim the name of 100-percent Americanism
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Names #Flags #United States

Fascism will come to America wrapped in a flag,
-- Sinclair Lewis

#America #Flags #Fascism

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Art #Years #Letters

It has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditation upon the fact that he is better off than others.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Meditation #Contentment #Facts

Most troubles are unnecessary. We have Nature beaten; we can make her grow wheat; we can keep warm when she sends blizzards. So we raise the devil just for pleasure--wars, politics, race-hatreds, labor-disputes.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#War #Race #Hatred

Pugnacity is a form of courage, but a very bad form.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Form

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

#Baseball #Party #Events

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Writing #Safe #Polite

I love America, but I don't like it.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#America

Good Lord, I don't know what 'rights' a man has! And I don't know the solution of boredom. If I did, I'd be the one philosopher that had the cure for living. But I do know that about ten times as many people find their lives dull, and unnecessarily dull, as ever admit it; and I do believe that if we busted out and admitted it sometimes, instead of being nice and patient and loyal for sixty years, and then nice and patient and dead for the rest of eternity, why, maybe, possibly, we might make life more fun.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Fun #Nice #Believe

In fact, the whole thing about prohibition is this: it isn't the initial cost, it's the humidity.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Facts #Cost #Prohibition

A man takes a drink, the drink takes another, and the drink takes the man.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Food #Men #Drink

On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy has given the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Democracy #Ordinary #Dignity

His name was George F. Babbitt, and . . . he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Names #People #House

The game (baseball)was a custom of his clan, and it gave outlet for the homicidal and sides-taking instincts which Babbitt called "patriotism" and "love of sport."
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Sports #Baseball #Games

Love is the one thing that can really sure-enough lighten all of life's dark clouds.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Love #Dark #Clouds

The most important part of living is not the living but the pondering upon it.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Life #Important #Pondering

It's one of our favorite American myths that broad plains necessarily make broad minds, and high mountains make high purpose.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#America #Mind #Mountain

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

#Inspiration #Impossible #Hours

What are these unheard of sins you condemn so much - and like so well?
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Sin #Wells #Unheard

You've been telling us about how to secure peace, but come on, now, General-just among us Rotarians and Rotary Anns-'fess up! With your great experience, don't you honest, cross-your-heart, think that perhaps-just maybe-when a country has gone money-mad, like all our labor unions and workmen, with their propaganda to hoist income taxes, so that the thrifty and industrious have to pay for the shiftless ne'er-do-weels, then maybe, to save their lazy souls and get some iron into them, a war might be a good thing? Come on, now, tell your real middle name, Mong General!
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Country #Real #War

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Country #Art #Successful

Do you think it's so snobbish, to want to see something besides one's fellow citizens abroad?
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Travel #Thinking #Want

Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest; it is an industry.
-- Sinclair Lewis

#Winter