Sinclair Lewis Quotes

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

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

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.

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

What is Love? Listen! It is the rainbow that stands out, in all its glorious many-colored hues, illuminating and making glad again the dark clouds of life. It is the morning and the evening star, that in glad refulgence, there on the awed horizon, call Nature's hearts to an uplifted rejoicing in God's marvelous firmament!

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

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

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

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.

Sleep with me sleep with my dogs-

When facism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the American flag.

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

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.

There is no greater compliment to the Jews than the fact that the degree of their unpopularity is always the scientific measure of the cruelty and silliness of the regime under which they live.

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

Men die, but the plutocracy is immortal; and it is necessary that fresh generations should be trained to its service.

Fascism will come to America wrapped in a flag.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead.

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.

Cure the evils of Democracy by the evils of Fascism! Funny therapeutics! I've heard of their curing syphilis by giving the patient malaria, but I've never heard of their curing malaria by giving the patient syphilis.

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.

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.

People read fiction for emotion-not information

A man takes a drink, the drink takes another, and the drink takes the man.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

NOW is a fact that cannot be dodged.

So much in a revolution is nothing but waiting.

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

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

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.

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.

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