There are two insults which no human being will endure: The assertion that he hasn’t a sense of humor, and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.
SINCLAIR LEWISDon’t be a writer. Writing is an escape from something. You be a scientist.
More Sinclair Lewis Quotes
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To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead.
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Paris is one of the largest, and certainly it is the pleasantest, of modern American cities.
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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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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.
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Being a man given to oratory and high principles, he enjoyed the sound of his own vocabulary and the warmth of his own virtue.
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You,” Said Dr. Yavitch, “are a middle-road liberal, and you haven’t the slightest idea what you want.
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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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The game (baseball)was a custom of his clan, and it gave outlet for the homicidal and sides-taking instincts which Babbitt called “patriotism” and “love of sport.”
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The world and all its wisdom is but a booby, blundering school-boy that needs management and could be managed.
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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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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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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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The most important part of living is not the living but the pondering upon it.
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Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest; it is an industry.
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On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy has given the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had.
SINCLAIR LEWIS






