The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.
SINCLAIR LEWISThink how much better it is to criticize conventional customs if you yourself live up to them, scrupulously.
More Sinclair Lewis Quotes
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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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Don’t be a writer. Writing is an escape from something. You be a scientist.
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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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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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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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He loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons.
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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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People read fiction for emotion-not information
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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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Sleep with me sleep with my dogs-
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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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Paris is one of the largest, and certainly it is the pleasantest, of modern American cities.
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Illuminating and making glad again the dark clouds of life. It is the morning and the evening star, that in glad refulgence, there on the awed horizon, call Nature’s hearts to an uplifted rejoicing in God’s marvelous firmament!
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Why is it that traveling Americans are always so dreadful?
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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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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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Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.
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Curiously, neither God nor the devil may wear modern dress, but must retain Grecian vestments.
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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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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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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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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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Life is hard and astonishingly complicated…. No one great reform will make it easy.
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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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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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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.
SINCLAIR LEWIS