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.
SINCLAIR LEWISThe one thing that can be more disconcerting than intelligent hatred is demanding love.
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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You have more people that love you than you know.
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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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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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Why is it that traveling Americans are always so dreadful?
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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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He loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons.
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People will buy anything that is one to a customer.
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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.
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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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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We’re tired of hearing politicians and priests and cautious reformers… coax us, ‘Be calm! Be patient! Wait!
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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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I think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We’re tired of drudging and sleeping and dying.
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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






