Think how much better it is to criticize conventional customs if you yourself live up to them, scrupulously.
SINCLAIR LEWISWhen 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!
More Sinclair Lewis Quotes
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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.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
Most troubles are unnecessary. We have Nature beaten; we can make her grow wheat; we can keep warm when she sends blizzards. So we raise the devil just for pleasure–wars, politics, race-hatreds, labor-disputes.
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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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Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
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.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
Good Lord, I don’t know what ‘rights’ a man has! And I don’t know the solution of boredom. If I did, I’d be the one philosopher that had the cure for living. But I do know that about ten times as many people find their lives dull, and unnecessarily dull.
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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.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all.
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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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It isn’t what you earn but how spend it that fixes your class.
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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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Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest; it is an industry.
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Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.
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Fascism will come to America wrapped in a flag.
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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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If there is anything worse than the aching tedium of staring out of car windows.
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Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.
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I am convinced that everything that is worth while in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever.
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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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Funny 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.
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She did her work with the thoroughness of a mind which reveres details and never quite understands them.
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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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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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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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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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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.
SINCLAIR LEWIS