In everything was the spirit of children’s play – not the rule-ridden, time-killing play of adults that is a preparation for death, but the busy and credulous play of children that is a preparation for life.
SINCLAIR LEWISIn protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.
More Sinclair Lewis Quotes
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I love America, but I don’t like 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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Curiously, neither God nor the devil may wear modern dress, but must retain Grecian vestments.
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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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On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy has given the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had.
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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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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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Since dictating the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to explain it,
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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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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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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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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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We’re tired of hearing politicians and priests and cautious reformers… coax us, ‘Be calm! Be patient! Wait!
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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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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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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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You,” Said Dr. Yavitch, “are a middle-road liberal, and you haven’t the slightest idea what you want.
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The world and all its wisdom is but a booby, blundering school-boy that needs management and could be managed.
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Pugnacity is a form of courage, but a very bad form.
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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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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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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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Love is the one thing that can really sure-enough lighten all of life’s dark clouds.
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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.
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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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Men die, but the plutocracy is immortal; and it is necessary that fresh generations should be trained to its service.
SINCLAIR LEWIS