Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn “reasonable” and become your enemies.
SINCLAIR LEWISLife is hard and astonishingly complicated…. No one great reform will make it easy.
More Sinclair Lewis Quotes
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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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Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.
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I was brought up to believe that the Christian God wasn’t a scared and compromising public servant, but the creator of the whole merciless truth, and I reckon that training spoiled me – I actually took my teachers seriously!
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There are dozens of young poets and fictioneers most of them a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce, who, however insane they may be, have refused to be genteel and traditional and dull.
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I have for myself no conceivable complaint to make, and yet for American literature in general, and its standing in a country where industrialism and finance and science flourish and the only arts that are vital and respected are architecture and the film, I have a considerable complaint.
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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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He loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons.
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I’ve heard of their curing syphilis by giving the patient malaria, but I’ve never heard of their curing malaria by giving the patient syphilis.
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It might be the doing of Satan, in whom Aaron anxiously believed with all of his being except, perhaps, his mind.
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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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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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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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Vast is the power of cities to reclaim the wanderer.
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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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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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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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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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Unhappy women are given to protecting their sensitiveness by cynical gossip, by whining, by high-church and new-thought religions, or by a fog of vagueness.
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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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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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We’re tired of hearing politicians and priests and cautious reformers… coax us, ‘Be calm! Be patient! Wait!
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NOW is a fact that cannot be dodged.
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There is no greater compliment to the Jews than the fact that the degree of their unpopularity is always the scientific measure of the cruelty and silliness of the regime under which they live.
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When 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!
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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.
SINCLAIR LEWIS