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.
SINCLAIR LEWISYou’re so earnest about morality that I hate to think how essentially immoral you must be underneath.
More Sinclair Lewis Quotes
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Since dictating the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to explain it,
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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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We’re tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We’re tired of always deferring hope till the next generation.
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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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Fascism will come to America wrapped in a flag.
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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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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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On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy has given the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had.
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I love America, but I don’t like it.
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Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.
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NOW is a fact that cannot be dodged.
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When facism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the American flag.
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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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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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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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I have faith in Faith, I have reverence for all true Reverence.
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To live in Carlsbad is seemly and to loaf at San Remo healing to the soul, but to get from Carlsbad to San Remo is of the devil.
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Fine, large, meaningless, general terms like romance and business can always be related. They take the place of thinking, and are highly useful to optimists and lecturers.
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Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest; it is an industry.
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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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Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.
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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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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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The world and all its wisdom is but a booby, blundering school-boy that needs management and could be managed.
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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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