Sinclair Lewis Quotes & Sayings

Blessed be they who are not Patriots and Idealists, and who do not feel they must dash right in and Do Something About It, something so immediately important that all doubters must be liquidated - tortured - slaughtered! Good old murder, that since the slaying of Abel by Cain has always been the new device by which all oligarchies and dictators have, for all future ages to come, removed opposition! — Sinclair Lewis

She could not escape asking (in the exact words and mental intonations which a thousand million women, dairy wenches and mischief-making queens, had used before her, and which a million million women will know hereafter), "Was it all a horrible mistake, my marrying him?" She quieted the doubt
without answering it. — Sinclair Lewis

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

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

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

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

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

Why are you so afraid of the word 'Fascism,' Doremus? Just a word - just a word! And might not be so bad, with all the lazy bums we got panhandling relief nowadays, and living on my income tax and yours - not so worse to have a real Strong Man, like Hitler or Mussolini - like Napoleon or Bismarck in the good old days - and have 'em really run the country and make it efficient and prosperous again. 'Nother words, have a doctor who won't take any back-chat, but really boss the patient and make him get well whether he likes it or not! — Sinclair Lewis

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

The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his "ideas" almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store.
Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only wings of a windmill. — Sinclair Lewis

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. — Sinclair Lewis

Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut 'Liberty cabbage' and somebody actually proposed calling German measles 'Liberty measles'? — Sinclair Lewis

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

Say, I swear the best Messiah in the whole show is this darky, Father Divine. — Sinclair Lewis

As to industrial conditions, however, Babbitt had thought a great deal, and his opinions may be coordinated as follows: A good labor union is of value because it keeps out radical unions, which would destroy property. No one ought to be forced to belong to a union, however. All labor agitators who try to force men to join a union should be hanged. In fact, just between ourselves, there oughtn't to be any unions allowed at all; and as it's the best way of fighting the unions, every business man ought to belong to an employers'-association and to the Chamber of Commerce. In union there is strength. So any selfish hog who doesn't join the Chamber of Commerce ought to be forced to. — Sinclair Lewis

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

Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?. . .Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition - shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor - no, that couldn't happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! — Sinclair Lewis

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

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

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

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

government of the profits, by the profits, for the profits. — Sinclair Lewis

The poor we have always with us, and the purpose of the Lord in providing the poor is to enable us of the better classes to amuse ourselves by investigating them and uplifting them and at dinners telling how charitable we are. The poor don't like it much. They have no gratitude. They would rather be uplifters themselves. But if they are taken firmly in hand they can be kept reasonably dependent and interesting for years. — Sinclair Lewis

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

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

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

Babbitt looked up irritably from the comic strips in the Evening Advocate. They composed his favorite literature and art, these illustrated chronicles in which Mr. Mutt hit Mr. Jeff with a rotten egg, and Mother corrected Father's vulgarisms by means of a rolling-pin. With the solemn face of a devotee, breathing heavily through his open mouth, he plodded nightly through every picture, and during the rite he detested interruptions. — Sinclair Lewis

Summarized, the letter explained that he was all against the banks but all for the bankers-except the Jewish bankers who were to be driven out of finance entirely; that he had thoroughly tested (but unspecified) plans to make all wages very high and the prices of everything produced by these same highly paid workers very low; that he was 100 per cent for Labor, but 100 per cent against all strikes; and that he was in favor of the United States so arming itself, so preparing to produce its own coffee, sugar, perfumes, tweeds, and nickel instead of importing them, that it could defy the World...and maybe, if that World was so impertinent as to defy American in turn, Buzz hinted, he might have to take it over and run it properly. — Sinclair Lewis

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

To the connoisseur of scenes, nothing is more enjoyable than a thorough, melodramatic, egoistic humility. — Sinclair Lewis

She found beauty in the children. — Sinclair Lewis

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

No one, even among the Washington correspondents, seemed to know precisely how much of a part in Senator Windrip's career was taken by his secretary, Lee Sarason. When Windrip had first seized power in his state, Sarason had been managing editor of the most widely circulated paper in all that part of the country. Sarason's genesis was and remained a mystery. — Sinclair Lewis

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

Doremus was amazed, felt a little apologetic over his failure to have appreciated this new-found paragon, as he sat in American Legion Hall and heard Shad bellowing: "I don't pretend to be anything but a plain working-stiff, but there's forty million workers like me, and we know that Senator Windrip is the first statesman in years that thinks of what guys like us need before he thinks one doggone thing about politics. Come on, you bozos! The swell folks tell you to not be selfish! Walt Trowbridge tells you to not be selfish! Well, be selfish, and vote for the one man that's willing to give you something - give you something! - and not just grab off every cent and every hour of work that he can get! — Sinclair Lewis

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

Sleep with me sleep with my dogs- — Sinclair Lewis

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

Main Street is the climax of civilization. That this Ford car might stand in front of the Bon Ton Store, Hannibal invaded Rome and Erasmus wrote in Oxford cloisters. What Ole Jenson the grocer says to Ezra Stowbody the banker is the new law for London, Prague, and the unprofitable isles of the sea; whatsoever Ezra does not know and sanction, that thing is heresy, worthless for knowing and wicked to consider. — Sinclair Lewis

If you want to be a writer, learn to type. — Sinclair Lewis

There will never be a state of society anything like perfect! There never will be a time when there won't be a large proportion of people who feel poor no matter how much they have, and envy their neighbors who know how to wear cheap clothes showily, and envy neighbors who can dance or make love or digest better. — Sinclair Lewis

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

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

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

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

The railroad was more than a means of transportation to Gopher Prairie. It was a new god; a monster of steel limbs, oak ribs, flesh of gravel, and a stupendous hunger for freight; a deity created by man that he might keep himself respectful to Property, as elsewhere he had elevated and served as tribal gods the mines, cotton-mills, motor-factories, colleges, army. — Sinclair Lewis

Eddie Fislinger's church was an octagonal affair, with the pulpit in one angle, an arrangement which produced a fascinating, rather dizzy effect, reminiscent of the doctrine of predestination. — Sinclair Lewis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your lips are for songs about rivers in the morning and lakes at twilight. — Sinclair Lewis

In a matter of weeks, he had learned that without suffering and doubt, there can be no whole human being. — Sinclair Lewis

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

Life is comfortable and clean enough here already. And so secure. What it needs it to be less secure, more eager. — Sinclair Lewis

Damn the great executives, the men of measured merriment, damn the men with careful smiles oh, damn their measured merriment. — Sinclair Lewis

Street, and she was able to give Elmer the three hundred — Sinclair Lewis

My objection to the church isn't that the preachers are cruel, hypocritical, actually wicked, though some of them are that, too - think of how many are arrested for selling fake stock, for seducing 14-year-old girls in orphanages under their care, for arson, for murder. An it isn't so much that the church is in bondage to Big Business and doctrines as laid down by millionaires - though a lot of churches are that, too. My chief objection is that 99% of sermons and Sunday School teachings are so agonizingly dull. — Sinclair Lewis

Babbitt knew that in this place of death Paul was already dead. And as he pondered on the train home something in his own self seemed to have died: a loyal and vigorous faith in the goodness of the world, a fear of public disfavor, a pride in success. — Sinclair Lewis

The author says one character's definition of a classic is any book he'd heard of before he was thirty. — Sinclair Lewis

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

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

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

Breeze which had crossed a thousand miles of wheat-lands bellied her taffeta skirt in a line so graceful, so full of animation and moving beauty, that the heart of a chance watcher on the lower road tightened to wistfulness over her quality of suspended freedom. She lifted her arms, she leaned back against the wind, her skirt dipped and flared, a lock blew wild. A girl on a hilltop; credulous, plastic, young; drinking the air as she longed to drink life. The eternal aching comedy of expectant youth. — Sinclair Lewis

It was not an esthetic room. Though Frank Shallard might have come to admire pictures, great music, civilized furniture, he had been trained to regard them as worldly, and to content himself with art which 'presented a message,' to regard 'Les Miserables' as superior because the bishop was a kind man, and 'The Scarlet Letter' as a poor book because the heroine was sinful and the author didn't mind. — Sinclair Lewis

[ ... ] all of the good-intentioners who wanted to 'do something for the common people' were insignificant, because the 'common people' were able to do things for themselves, and highly likely to, as soon as they learned the fact. — Sinclair Lewis

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

There are two insults no human being will endure: that he has no sense of humor, and that he has never known trouble. — Sinclair Lewis

Author sees the "congested idealism" of the generally discontent as reservoir that will support centralized power even while disagreeing with many specific provisions. — Sinclair Lewis

I'm a middle-class intellectual. I'd never call myself any such a damn silly thing, but since you Reds coined it, I'll have to accept it. That's my class, and that's what I'm interested in. The proletarians are probably noble fellows, but I certainly do not think that the interests of the middle-class intellectuals and the proletarians are the same. They want bread. We want - well, all right, say it, we want cake! — Sinclair Lewis

And, swearing that he'd let no English passers-by tell him what HE was going to wear, he stalked toward Piccadilly and into a hat-shop he remembered having seen. He'd just glance in there. Certainly they couldn't SELL him anything! English people couldn't sell like Americans! So he entered the shop and came out with a new gray felt hat for town, a new brown one for the country, a bowler, a silk evening hat, and a cap, and he was proud of himself for having begun the Europeanization which he wasn't going to begin. — Sinclair Lewis

I came trusting them. They beat me with rods of dullness. They don't know, they don't understand how agonizing their complacent dullness is. Like ants and August sun on a wound. - Carol Kennicott — Sinclair Lewis

HIS march to greatness was not without disastrous stumbling. — Sinclair Lewis

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

I think perhaps we want a more conscious life. — Sinclair Lewis

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. — Sinclair Lewis

As a newspaper man, Doremus remembered that the only reporters who misrepresented and concealed facts more unscrupulously than the Capitalists were the Communists. — Sinclair Lewis

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

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

Believing that only under God Almighty, to Whom we render all homage, do we Americans hold our vast Power, we shall guarantee to all persons absolute freedom of religious worship, provided, however, that no atheist, agnostic, believer in Black Magic, nor any Jew who shall refuse to swear allegiance to the New Testament, nor any person of any faith who refuses to take the Pledge to the Flag, shall be permitted to hold any public office or to practice as a teacher, professor, lawyer, judge, or as a physician, except in the category of Obstetrics. — Sinclair Lewis

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

Whatever she might become she would never be static. — Sinclair Lewis

And why, she began to ask, did she rage against individuals? Not individuals but institutions are the enemies, and they most afflict the disciples who the most generously serve them. They insinuate their tyranny under a hundred guises and pompous names, such as Polite Society, the Family, the Church, Sound Business, the Party, the Country, the Superior White Race; and the only defense against them, Carol beheld, was unembittered laughter. — Sinclair Lewis

I was feeling rational and restless, which is horrible for watching movies — Sinclair Lewis

People will think they're electing him to create more economic security. Then watch the Terror! God knows there's been enough indication that we can have tyranny in America-the fix of the southern share-croppers, the working conditions of the miners and garment-makers, and our keeping Mooney in prison so many years. But wait till Windrip shows us how to say it with machine guns! — Sinclair Lewis

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

Pushing in among this mob of camp followers who identified political virtue with money for their rent came a flying squad who suffered not from hunger but from congested idealism: Intellectuals and Reformers and even Rugged Individualists, who saw in Windrip, for all his clownish swindlerism, a free vigor which promised a rejuvenation of the crippled and senile capitalistic system. Upton — Sinclair Lewis

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. — Sinclair Lewis

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

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

He wanted to honor Shad for the sweaty shirt, the honest toil, and all the rugged virtues, but even as a Liberal American Humanitarian, Doremus found it hard always to keep up the Longfellow's-Village-Blacksmith-cum-Marx attitude consistently and not sometimes backslide into a belief that there must be some crooks and swine among the toilers as, notoriously, there were so shockingly many among persons with more than $3500 a year. — Sinclair Lewis

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

Most of them had, among all the factors in the campaign, noticed only what they regarded as Windrip's humor, and three planks in his platform: Five, which promised to increase taxes on the rich; Ten, which condemned the Negroes - since nothing so elevates a dispossessed farmer or a factory worker on relief as to have some race, any race, on which he can look down; and, — Sinclair Lewis

Reek took not more than an hour to relate what would've taken the most intelligent man five or six hours
that is, five minutes of speech and the rest of the five hours to recover from the nausea caused by having to utter such shameless rot ... — Sinclair Lewis

He had expected that traditionally Republican Vermont would give him too drearily easy a task in preaching Trowbridge. What he found was a dismaying preference for the theoretically Democratic Buzz Windrip. And that preference, Doremus perceived, wasn't even a pathetic trust in Windrip's promises of Utopian bliss for everyone in general. It was a trust in increased cash for the voter himself, and for his family, very much in particular. — Sinclair Lewis

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

The tyranny of this dictatorship isn't primarily the fault of Big Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work. It's the fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups, who have let the demogogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest." 14 — Sinclair Lewis