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.
SINCLAIR LEWISIn other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.
More Sinclair Lewis Quotes
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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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It is one of the major tragedies that nothing is more discomforting than the hearty affection of the Old Friends who never were friends.
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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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I have for myself no conceivable complaint to make, and yet for American literature in general, and its standing in a country where industrialism and finance and science flourish and the only arts that are vital and respected are architecture and the film, I have a considerable complaint.
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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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Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.
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Since dictating the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to explain it,
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And that the pastor’s sermons, however dull they might seem at the time of taking, yet had a voodooistic power which ‘did a fellow good– kept him in touch with Higher Things.
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There are so many people in the world who are eager to do for you things that you do not wish done, provided only that you will do for them things that you don’t wish to do.
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Writers have a rare power not given to anyone else: we can bore people long after we are dead.
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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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One quarter are afraid to speak, and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed final quarter keep you alive.
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So much in a revolution is nothing but waiting.
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Thus Carol hit upon the tragedy of old age, which is not that it is less vigorous than youth, but that it is not needed by youth.
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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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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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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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As ever admit it; and I do believe that if we busted out and admitted it sometimes, instead of being nice and patient and loyal for sixty years, and then nice and patient and dead for the rest of eternity, why, maybe, possibly, we might make life more fun.
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We’re tired of hearing politicians and priests and cautious reformers… coax us, ‘Be calm! Be patient! Wait!
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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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People will buy anything that is one to a customer.
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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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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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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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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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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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