It is, I think, an error to believe that there is any need of religion to make life seem worth living.
SINCLAIR LEWISFunny how the world always praises its opera-singers so much and pays ’em so well and then starves its shoemakers, and yet it needs good shoes so much more than it needs opera–or war or fiction.
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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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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It might be the doing of Satan, in whom Aaron anxiously believed with all of his being except, perhaps, his mind.
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A man takes a drink, the drink takes another, and the drink takes the man.
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People read fiction for emotion-not information
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The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.
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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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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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Why is it that traveling Americans are always so dreadful?
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Paris is one of the largest, and certainly it is the pleasantest, of modern American cities.
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My chief objection is that 99% of sermons and Sunday School teachings are so agonizingly dull.
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So that the thrifty and industrious have to pay for the shiftless ne’er-do-weels, then maybe, to save their lazy souls and get some iron into them, a war might be a good thing? Come on, now, tell your real middle name, Mong General!
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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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I have faith in Faith, I have reverence for all true Reverence.
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Upon this theology he rarely pondered. The kernel of his practical religion was that it was respectable, and beneficial to one’s business, to be seen going to services; that the church kept the Worst Elements from being still worse.
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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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What are these unheard of sins you condemn so much – and like so well?
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Think how much better it is to criticize conventional customs if you yourself live up to them, scrupulously.
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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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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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He loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons.
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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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Men die, but the plutocracy is immortal; and it is necessary that fresh generations should be trained to its service.
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Emotionally I know she is better than every other country.
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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.
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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