Why is it that traveling Americans are always so dreadful?
SINCLAIR LEWISThat nation is proudest and noblest and most exalted which has the greatest number of really great men.
More Sinclair Lewis Quotes
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There are so many people in the world who are eager to do for you things that you do not wish done, provided only that you will do for them things that you don’t wish to do.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
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.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
It is the irritation of getting tickets, packing, finding trains, lying in bouncing berths, washing without water, digging out passports, and fighting through customs.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
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.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
Being a man given to oratory and high principles, he enjoyed the sound of his own vocabulary and the warmth of his own virtue.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
Most of us who work — or want to work — will always have trouble or discontent. So we must learn to be calm, and train all our faculties, and make others happy.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
When facism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the American flag.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
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.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy has given the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
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.”
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
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.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
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.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
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 LEWIS -
Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
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.
SINCLAIR LEWIS