I’ve heard of their curing syphilis by giving the patient malaria, but I’ve never heard of their curing malaria by giving the patient syphilis.
SINCLAIR LEWISExcept for half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement of ignorance which is so easy to come by.
More Sinclair Lewis Quotes
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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 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 most important part of living is not the living but the pondering upon it.
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God has never done much but creep around and try to catch us disobeying it.
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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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What is Love? Listen! It is the rainbow that stands out, in all its glorious many-colored hues.
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We’d get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all.
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Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.
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My objection to the church isn’t that the preachers are cruel, hypocritical, actually wicked, though some of them are that, too .
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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.
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A man takes a drink, the drink takes another, and the drink takes the man.
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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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An it isn’t so much that the church is in bondage to Big Business and doctrines as laid down by millionaires – though a lot of churches are that, too.
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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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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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Don’t be a writer. Writing is an escape from something. You be a scientist.
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His name was George F. Babbitt, and . . . he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.
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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.
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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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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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You’re so earnest about morality that I hate to think how essentially immoral you must be underneath.
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Intellectually I know that America is no better than any 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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On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy has given the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had.
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Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.
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Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
SINCLAIR LEWIS