Lewis Sinclair Quotes & Sayings

If that woman is on the side of the angels, then I have no choice; I must be on the side of the devil. — Sinclair Lewis

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

His name was George F. Babbitt. He was forty-six years old now, in April, 1920, and he made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry, but he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.
His large head was pink, his brown hair thin and dry. His face was babyish in slumber, despite his wrinkles and the red spectacle-dents on the slopes of his nose. He was not fat but he was exceedingly well fed; his cheeks were pads, and the unroughened hand which lay helpless upon the khaki-colored blanket was slightly puffy. — Sinclair Lewis

cigar, and walked up and down before the house, a portly, — Sinclair Lewis

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

Said Doremus, "Hm. Yes, I agree it's a serious time. With all the discontent there is in the country to wash him into office, Senator Windrip has got an excellent chance to be elected President, next November, and if he is, probably his gang of buzzards will get us into some war, just to grease their insane vanity and show the world that we're the huskiest nation going. And then I, the Liberal and you, the Plutocrat, the bogus Tory, will be led out and shot at 3 A.M. Serious? Huh! — Sinclair Lewis

Of the love-making of Carol and Will Kennicott there is nothing to be told which may not be heard on every summer evening, on every shadowy block. — 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

In America the Struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word "Fascism" and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty. For they were thieves not only of wages but of honor. — 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

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

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

You have more people that love you than you know. — 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

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

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

Lord, why can't the women let you alone? Just because once or twice, seven hundred million years ago, you were a poor fool, why can't they let you forget it? — Sinclair Lewis

his secretary-press-agent-private-philosopher, Lee Sarason, yielded nothing to others'. — Sinclair Lewis

She was close in her husband's arms; she clung to him; whatever of strangeness and slowness and insularity she might find in him, none of that mattered so long as she could slip her hands beneath his coat, run her fingers over the warm smoothness of the satin back of his waistcoat, seem almost to creep into his body, find in him strength, find in the courage and kindness of her man a shelter from the perplexing world. — 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

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

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

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

She did not yet know the immense ability of the world to be casually cruel and proudly dull, — Sinclair Lewis

On the walk, like shredded lovely flesh, were the petals of the last gallant rose. — Sinclair Lewis

The Reverend Elmer Gantry was reading an illustrated pink periodical devoted to prize fighters and chorus girls in his room at Elizabeth J. Schmutz Hall late of an afternoon when two large men walked in without knocking.
Why, good evening, Brother Bains - Brother Naylor! This is a pleasant surprise. I was, uh - Did you ever see this horrible rag? About actoresses. An invention of the devil himself. I was thinking of denouncing it next Sunday. I hope you never read it - won't you sit down, gentlemen? - take this chair - I hope you never read it, Brother Floyd, because the footsteps of - — Sinclair Lewis

There was much conversation, most of which sounded like the rest of it. — 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

People read fiction for emotion-not information — Sinclair Lewis

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

Now, you look here! The first thing you got to understand is that all this uplift and flipflop and settlement-work and recreation is nothing in God's world but the entering wedge for socialism. The sooner a man learns he isn't going to be coddled, and he needn't expect a lot of free grub and, uh, all these free classes and flipflop and doodads for his kids unless he earns 'em, why, the sooner he'll get on the job and produce - produce - produce! That's what the country needs, and not all this fancy stuff that just enfeebles the will-power of the working man and gives his kids a lot of notions above their class. — Sinclair Lewis

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

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

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

What this country needs is Discipline! Peace is a great dream, but maybe sometimes it's only a pipe dream! I'm not so sure - now this will shock you, but I want you to listen to one woman who will tell you the unadulterated hard truth instead of a lot of sentimental taffy, and I'm not sure but that we need to be in a real war again, in order to learn Discipline! We don't want all this highbrow intellectuality, all this book-learning. That's good enough in its way, but isn't it, after all, just a nice toy for grownups? No, what we all of us must have, if this great land is going to go on maintaining its high position among the Congress of Nations, is Discipline - Will Power - Character! — Sinclair Lewis

He said brokenly many things beautiful in their common-ness. — Sinclair Lewis

There were two things, they told Doremus, that distinguished this prairie Demosthenes. He was an actor of genius. There was no more overwhelming actor on the stage, in the motion pictures, nor even in the pulpit. He would whirl arms, bang tables, glare from mad eyes, vomit Biblical wrath from a gaping mouth; but he would also coo like a nursing mother, beseech like an aching lover, and in between tricks would coldly and almost contemptuously jab his crowds with figures and facts - figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect. — Sinclair Lewis

He had every prejudice and aspiration of every American Common Man. He believed in the desirability and therefore the sanctity of thick buckwheat cakes with adulterated maple syrup, in rubber trays for the ice cubes in his electric refrigerator, in the especial nobility of dogs, all dogs, in the oracles of S. Parkes Cadman, in being chummy with all waitresses at all junction lunch rooms, and in Henry Ford (when he became President, he exulted, maybe he could get Mr. Ford to come to supper at the White House), and the superiority of anyone who possessed a million dollars. He regarded spats, walking sticks, caviar, titles, tea-drinking, poetry not daily syndicated in newspapers and all foreigners, possibly excepting the British, as degenerate. — 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

It keeps strays in the flock. To word it differently: 'You must live up to the popular code if you believe in it; but if you don't believe in it, then you MUST live up to it! — Sinclair Lewis

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

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 love America, but I don't like it. — 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

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

Sinclair Lewis may be ripe for a revival; his books raise several interesting issues of art and fashion. — Jane Smiley

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

Whatever poet, orator or sage may say of it, old age is still old age. — Sinclair Lewis

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

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

I'm not sure that I shall. I'm trying to develop my own large capacity for dullness and contentment. I've failed at every positive thing I've tried. I'd better 'settle down,' as they call it, and be satisfied to be - nothing. — 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

Why is it that traveling Americans are always so dreadful? — 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

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

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

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

All this working land was turned into exuberance by the light. The sunshine was dizzy on open stubble; shadows from immense cumulus clouds were forever sliding across low mounds; and the sky was wider and loftier and more resolutely blue than the sky of cities ... she declared. It's a glorious country; a land to be big in — 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

It is an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness, of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear respectable. It is contentment ... the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is dullness made God. A savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking chairs prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world. — 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

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

Sleep with me sleep with my dogs- — Sinclair Lewis

a huddle of robot sheep bleating their terror with mechanical lungs of a hundred horsepower. — Sinclair Lewis

The conspicuous fault of the Jeffersonian Party, like the personal fault of Senator Trowbridge, was that it represented integrity and reason, in a year when the electorate hungered for frisky emotions, for the peppery sensations associated, usually, not with monetary systems and taxation rates but with baptism by immersion in the creek, young love under the elms, straight whisky, angelic orchestras heard soaring down from the full moon, fear of death when an automobile teeters above a canyon, thirst in a desert and quenching it with spring water - all the primitive sensations which they thought they found in the screaming of Buzz Windrip. * — Sinclair Lewis

Well, he'd get help from the Bible. It was all inspired, every word, no matter what scoffers like Jim said. He'd take the first text he turned to and talk on that.
He opened on: 'Now THEREFORE, Tatnai, governor beyond the river, Shethar-boznai, and your companions the Apharsachites, which ARE beyond the river, be ye far from thence,' an injunction spirited but not at present helpful. — 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

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

There's no stronger bulwark of sound conservatism than the evangelical church, and no better place to make friends who'll help you to gain your rightful place in the community than in your own church-home! — 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

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

My dear man, there's nothing I'd like better than to be by myself occasionally ... I suppose you expect me to sit here and dream delicately and satisfy my tempermentality while you wander in from the bathroom with lather all over your face and shout seen my brown pants? — Sinclair Lewis

He was afraid that the world struggle today was not of Communism against Fascism, but of tolerance against the bigotry that was preached equally by Communism and Fascism. — Sinclair Lewis

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

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

But plenty things like this happened before Buzz Windrip ever came in, Doremus," insisted John Pollikop ... "You never thought about them, because they was just routine news, to stick in your paper. — Sinclair Lewis

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

I wrote 'It Can't Happen Here,' but I began to think it certainly can. — Sinclair Lewis

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

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

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

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

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

Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest; it is an industry. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

If there is anything worse than the aching tedium of staring out of car windows, it is the irritation of getting tickets, packing, finding trains, lying in bouncing berths, washing without water, digging out passports, and fighting through customs. To live in Carlsbad is seemly and to loaf at San Remo healing to the soul, but to get from Carlsbad to San Remo is of the devil. — Sinclair Lewis

Sinclair Lewis was asked one time to give a talk to class of students about writing. When he got there he asked the class, Do you people want to be writers?and they all said yes. Then Lewis said, Why the hell aren't you at home writing? — Tom T. Hall

Thus it came to him merely to run away was folly, because he could never run away from himself. — Sinclair Lewis

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

[ ... ] 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

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

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

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

All Negroes shall be prohibited from voting, holding public office, practicing law, medicine, or teaching in any class above the grade of grammar school, and they shall be taxed 100 per cent of all sums in excess of $10,000 per family per year which they may earn or in any other manner receive. — Sinclair Lewis