A man takes a drink, the drink takes another, and the drink takes the man.
SINCLAIR LEWISParis is one of the largest, and certainly it is the pleasantest, of modern American cities.
More Sinclair Lewis Quotes
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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.
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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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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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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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The one thing that can be more disconcerting than intelligent hatred is demanding love.
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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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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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In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.
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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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Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.
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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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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.
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We have the plans for a Utopia already made; just wiser than you.’ For ten thousand years they’ve said that. We want our Utopia now — and we’re going to try our hands at it.
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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.
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Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn “reasonable” and become your enemies.
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Writers kid themselves-about themselves and other people. Take the talk about writing methods.
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Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
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Indians, of course, have no “theology,” and indeed no word for the system of credulity in which the white priests arrange for God, who must be entirely bewildered by it, a series of excuses for his failures.
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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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Men die, but the plutocracy is immortal; and it is necessary that fresh generations should be trained to its service.
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It has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditation upon the fact that he is better off than others.
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The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.
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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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Most troubles are unnecessary. We have Nature beaten; we can make her grow wheat; we can keep warm when she sends blizzards. So we raise the devil just for pleasure–wars, politics, race-hatreds, labor-disputes.
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You’ve been telling us about how to secure peace, but come on, now, General-just among us Rotarians and Rotary Anns-‘fess up!
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That nation is proudest and noblest and most exalted which has the greatest number of really great men.
SINCLAIR LEWIS