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 LEWISPugnacity is a form of courage, but a very bad form.
More Sinclair Lewis Quotes
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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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In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.
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The Maker of the universe with stars a hundred thousand light-years apart was interested, furious, and very personal about it if a small boy played baseball on Sunday afternoon.
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Paris is one of the largest, and certainly it is the pleasantest, of modern American cities.
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Sleep with me sleep with my dogs-
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She was snatched back from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main Street.
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What are these unheard of sins you condemn so much – and like so well?
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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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Fascism will come to America wrapped in a flag.
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Good Lord, I don’t know what ‘rights’ a man has! And I don’t know the solution of boredom. If I did, I’d be the one philosopher that had the cure for living. But I do know that about ten times as many people find their lives dull, and unnecessarily dull.
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Life is hard and astonishingly complicated…. No one great reform will make it easy.
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Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won’t be for another thousand years?
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Damn the great executives, the men of measured merriment, damn the men with careful smiles, damn the men that run the shops, oh, damn their measured merriment.
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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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NOW is a fact that cannot be dodged.
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Writers kid themselves-about themselves and other people. Take the talk about writing methods.
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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!
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The most important part of living is not the living but the pondering upon it.
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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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To be ‘intellectual’ or ‘artistic’ or, in their own word, to be ‘highbrow,’ is to be priggish and of dubious virtue.
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If there is anything worse than the aching tedium of staring out of car windows.
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With your great experience, don’t you honest, cross-your-heart, think that perhaps-just maybe-when a country has gone money-mad, like all our labor unions and workmen, with their propaganda to hoist income taxes.
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If travel were so inspiring and informing a business … then the wisest men in the world would be deck hands on tramp steamers.
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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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Writing is just work-there’s no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type with your toes-it is just work.
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Since dictating the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to explain it,
SINCLAIR LEWIS