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 LEWISThe trouble with this country is that there are too many people going about saying, “The trouble with this country is….”
More Sinclair Lewis Quotes
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You’ve been telling us about how to secure peace, but come on, now, General-just among us Rotarians and Rotary Anns-‘fess up!
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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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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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It is the irritation of getting tickets, packing, finding trains, lying in bouncing berths, washing without water, digging out passports, and fighting through customs.
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I love America, but I don’t like it.
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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.
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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.
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He loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons.
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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.
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It isn’t what you earn but how spend it that fixes your class.
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You’re so earnest about morality that I hate to think how essentially immoral you must be underneath.
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It is, I think, an error to believe that there is any need of religion to make life seem worth living.
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What are these unheard of sins you condemn so much – and like so well?
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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!
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I, being a revolutionist, know exactly what I want — and what I want now is a drink.
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Pugnacity is a form of courage, but a very bad form.
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Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
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I must say I’m not very fond of oratory that’s so full of energy it hasn’t any room for facts.
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Cure the evils of Democracy by the evils of Fascism! Funny therapeutics!
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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.
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Fascism will come to America wrapped in a flag.
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It is impossible to discourage the real writers – they don’t give a damn what you say, they’re going to write.
SINCLAIR LEWIS