Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn “reasonable” and become your enemies.
SINCLAIR LEWISIt has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditation upon the fact that he is better off than others.
More Sinclair Lewis Quotes
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Writing is just work-there’s no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type or write with your toes-it’s still just work.
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Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.
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If there is anything worse than the aching tedium of staring out of car windows.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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Sleep with me sleep with my dogs-
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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 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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You have more people that love you than you know.
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Vast is the power of cities to reclaim the wanderer.
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Cure the evils of Democracy by the evils of Fascism! Funny therapeutics!
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Since dictating the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to explain it,
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Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country.
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Indians, of course, have no “theology,” and indeed no word for the system of credulity in which the white priests arrange for God, who must be entirely bewildered by it, a series of excuses for his failures.
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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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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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Pugnacity is a form of courage, but a very bad form.
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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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The trouble with this country is that there are too many people going about saying, “The trouble with this country is….”
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But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and silencing them forever.
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When audiences come to see us authors lecture, it is largely in the hope that we’ll be funnier to look at than to read.
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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.
SINCLAIR LEWIS