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 LEWISGod has never done much but creep around and try to catch us disobeying it.
More Sinclair Lewis Quotes
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I can not understand why ministers presume to deliver sermons every week at appointed hours because it is humanly impossible for inspirations to come with clock-like regularity
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Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement of ignorance which is so easy to come by.
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The one thing that can be more disconcerting than intelligent hatred is demanding love.
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Writing is just work-there’s no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type or write with your toes-it’s still just work.
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Writers have a rare power not given to anyone else: we can bore people long after we are dead.
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Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.
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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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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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In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.
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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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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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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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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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People will buy anything that is one to a customer.
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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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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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Fortune has dealt with me rather too well. I have known little struggle, not much poverty, many generosities.
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We’d get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all.
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She did her work with the thoroughness of a mind which reveres details and never quite understands them.
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My chief objection is that 99% of sermons and Sunday School teachings are so agonizingly dull.
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Sleep with me sleep with my dogs-
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Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.
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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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A man takes a drink, the drink takes another, and the drink takes the man.
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God has never done much but creep around and try to catch us disobeying it.
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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.
SINCLAIR LEWIS