Think how much better it is to criticize conventional customs if you yourself live up to them, scrupulously.
SINCLAIR LEWISWinter is not a season, it’s an occupation.
More Sinclair Lewis Quotes
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It’s one of our favorite American myths that broad plains necessarily make broad minds, and high mountains make high purpose.
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if men and women would be human beings instead of just business men, or plumbers, or army officers, or commuters, or educators, or authors, or clubwomen, or traveling salesmen, or Socialists, or Republicans, or Salvation Army leaders, or wearers of cloths.
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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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We have the plans for a Utopia already made; just wiser than you.’ For ten thousand years they’ve said that. We want our Utopia now — and we’re going to try our hands at it.
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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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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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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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What are these unheard of sins you condemn so much – and like so well?
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If there is anything worse than the aching tedium of staring out of car windows.
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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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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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God has never done much but creep around and try to catch us disobeying it.
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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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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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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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Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement of ignorance which is so easy to come by.
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In fact, the whole thing about prohibition is this: it isn’t the initial cost, it’s the humidity.
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Emotionally I know she is better than every other country.
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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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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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Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn “reasonable” and become your enemies.
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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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So that the thrifty and industrious have to pay for the shiftless ne’er-do-weels, then maybe, to save their lazy souls and get some iron into them, a war might be a good thing? Come on, now, tell your real middle name, Mong General!
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You have more people that love you than you know.
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I, being a revolutionist, know exactly what I want — and what I want now is a drink.
SINCLAIR LEWIS