Top 250 Sinclair Lewis Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “When fascism comes to the United States it will be wrapped in the American flag and will claim the name of 100-percent Americanism.”

— Sinclair Lewis

2. “Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn “reasonable” and become your enemies, one quarter are afraid to speak, and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed final quarter keep you alive.”

— Sinclair Lewis

3. “I love America, but I don’t like it.”

— Sinclair Lewis

4. “It is impossible to discourage the real writers – they don’t give a damn what you say, they’re going to write.”

— Sinclair Lewis

5. “I wrote ‘It Can’t Happen Here,’ but I began to think it certainly can.”

— Sinclair Lewis

6. “It isn’t what you earn but how spend it that fixes your class.”

— Sinclair Lewis

7. “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

8. “Elmer Gantry never knew who set him thirty dimes, wrapped in a tract about holiness, nor why. But he found the sentiments in the tract useful in his sermon, and the thirty dimes he spent for lovely photographs of burlesque ladies.”

— Sinclair Lewis

9. “What is love? It is the morning and the evening star.”

— Sinclair Lewis

10. “Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.”

— Sinclair Lewis

11. “Men die, but the plutocracy is immortal; and it is necessary that fresh generations should be trained to its service.”

— Sinclair Lewis

12. “People will buy anything that is one to a customer.”

— Sinclair Lewis

13. “Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know she is better than every other country.”

— Sinclair Lewis

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14. “The most important part of living is not the living but the pondering upon it.”

— Sinclair Lewis

15. “We’d get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all.”

— Sinclair Lewis

16. “In fact, the whole thing about prohibition is this: it isn’t the initial cost, it’s the humidity.”

— Sinclair Lewis

17. “Curiously, neither God nor the devil may wear modern dress, but must retain Grecian vestments.”

— Sinclair Lewis

18. “In America the Struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word “Fascism” and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty. For they were thieves not only of wages but of honor.”

— Sinclair Lewis

19. “More and more, as I think about history,” he pondered, “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. But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and of silencing them forever.”

— Sinclair Lewis

20. “It is, I think, an error to believe that there is any need of religion to make life seem worth living.”

— Sinclair Lewis

21. “It’s one of our favorite American myths that broad plains necessarily make broad minds, and high mountains make high purpose.”

— Sinclair Lewis

22. “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.”

— Sinclair Lewis

23. “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

24. “Winter is not a season, it’s an occupation.”

— Sinclair Lewis

25. “Just as he was an Elk, a Booster, and a member of the Chamber of Commerce, just as the priests of the Presbyterian Church determined his every religious belief and the senators who controlled the Republican Party decided in little smoky rooms in Washington what he should think about disarmament, tariff, and Germany, so did the large national advertisers fix the surface of his life, fix what he believed to be his individuality.”

— Sinclair Lewis

26. “Main Street is the climax of civilization. That this Ford car might stand in front of the Bon Ton Store, Hannibal invaded Rome and Erasmus wrote in Oxford cloisters. What Ole Jenson the grocer says to Ezra Stowbody the banker is the new law for London, Prague, and the unprofitable isles of the sea; whatsoever Ezra does not know and sanction, that thing is heresy, worthless for knowing and wicked to consider.”

— Sinclair Lewis

27. “So much in a revolution is nothing but waiting.”

— Sinclair Lewis

28. “A country that tolerates evil means- evil manners, standards of ethics-for a generation, will be so poisoned that it never will have any good end.”

— Sinclair Lewis

29. “Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.”

— Sinclair Lewis

30. “Cure the evils of Democracy by the evils of Fascism! Funny therapeutics! 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.”

— Sinclair Lewis

31. “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.”

— Sinclair Lewis

32. “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...”

— Sinclair Lewis

33. “She was snatched back from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main Street.”

— Sinclair Lewis

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34. “All the Utopias – Brook Farm, Robert Owen’s sanctuary of chatter, Upton Sinclair’s Helicon Hall – and their regulation end in scandal, feuds, poverty, griminess, disillusion.”

— Sinclair Lewis

35. “He called himself an “agnostic” instead of an “atheist” only because he detested the street-bawling, tract-peddling evangelicism of the professional atheists.”

— Sinclair Lewis

36. “The tyranny of this dictatorship isn’t primarily the fault of Big Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work. It’s the fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups, who have let the demogogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest.” 14.”

— Sinclair Lewis

37. “Vast is the power of cities to reclaim the wanderer.”

— Sinclair Lewis

38. “He stopped smoking at least once a month. He went through with it like the solid citizen he was: admitted the evils of tobacco, courageously made resolves, laid out plans to check the vice, tapered off his allowance of cigars, and expounded the pleasures of virtuousness to every one he met. He did everything, in fact, except stop smoking.”

— Sinclair Lewis

39. “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.”

— Sinclair Lewis

40. “So much of a revolution for so many people is nothing but waiting. That is one reason why tourists rarely see anything but contentment in a crushed population.”

— Sinclair Lewis

41. “The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his “ideas” almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store. Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only wings of a windmill.”

— Sinclair Lewis

42. “Damn the great executives, the men of measured merriment, damn the men with careful smiles, damn the men that run the shops, oh, damn their measured merriment.”

— Sinclair Lewis

43. “Thus it came to him merely to run away was folly, because he could never run away from himself.”

— Sinclair Lewis

44. “Why, America’s the only free nation on earth. Besides! Country’s too big for a revolution. No, no! Couldn’t happen here!”

— Sinclair Lewis

45. “No one, even among the Washington correspondents, seemed to know precisely how much of a part in Senator Windrip’s career was taken by his secretary, Lee Sarason. When Windrip had first seized power in his state, Sarason had been managing editor of the most widely circulated paper in all that part of the country. Sarason’s genesis was and remained a mystery.”

— Sinclair Lewis

46. “Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest; it is an industry.”

— Sinclair Lewis

47. “The Executive has got to have a freer hand and be able to move quick in an emergency, and not be tied down by a lot of dumb shyster-lawyer congressmen taking months to shoot off their mouths in debates.”

— Sinclair Lewis

48. “Writers kid themselves-about themselves and other people. Take the talk about writing methods. Writing is just work-there’s no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type with your toes-it is just work.”

— Sinclair Lewis

49. “There will never be a state of society anything like perfect! There never will be a time when there won’t be a large proportion of people who feel poor no matter how much they have, and envy their neighbors who know how to wear cheap clothes showily, and envy neighbors who can dance or make love or digest better.”

— Sinclair Lewis

50. “You’re so earnest about morality that I hate to think how essentially immoral you must be underneath.”

— Sinclair Lewis