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 LEWISHe 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.
More Sinclair Lewis Quotes
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Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement of ignorance which is so easy to come by.
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Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
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She did her work with the thoroughness of a mind which reveres details and never quite understands them.
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One quarter are afraid to speak, and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed final quarter keep you alive.
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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.
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Since dictating the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to explain it,
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Fascism will come to America wrapped in a flag.
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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!
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Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn “reasonable” and become your enemies.
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Emotionally I know she is better than every other country.
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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.
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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
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We’re tired of hearing politicians and priests and cautious reformers… coax us, ‘Be calm! Be patient! Wait!
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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.
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Winter is not a season, it’s an occupation.
SINCLAIR LEWIS