Top 250 Sinclair Lewis Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I can never forgive evil and lying and cruel means, and still less can I forgive fanatics that use that for an excuse! If I may imitate Romain Rolland, 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

52. “There is no Solution! There will never be a state of society anything like perfect!”

— Sinclair Lewis

53. “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.”

— Sinclair Lewis

54. “Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.”

— Sinclair Lewis

55. “Unhappy women are given to protecting their sensitiveness by cynical gossip, by whining, by high-church and new-thought religions, or by a fog of vagueness.”

— Sinclair Lewis

56. “More and more, as I think about history, 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

57. “Writers have a rare power not given to anyone else: we can bore people long after we are dead.”

— Sinclair Lewis

58. “A sensational event was changing from the brown suit to the gray the contents of his pockets. He was earnest about these objects. They were of eternal importance, like baseball or the Republican Party.”

— Sinclair Lewis

59. “I was brought up to believe that the Christian God wasn’t a scared and compromising public servant, but the creator of the whole merciless truth, and I reckon that training spoiled me – I actually took my teachers seriously!”

— Sinclair Lewis

60. “People read fiction for emotion-not information.”

— Sinclair Lewis

61. “He loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons.”

— Sinclair Lewis

62. “Don’t be a writer. Writing is an escape from something. You be a scientist.”

— Sinclair Lewis

63. “But plenty things like this happened before Buzz Windrip ever came in, Doremus,” insisted John Pollikop... “You never thought about them, because they was just routine news, to stick in your paper. Things like the sharecroppers and the Scottsboro boys and the plots of the California wholesalers against the agricultural union and dictatorship in Cuba and the way phony deputies in Kentucky shot striking miners.”

— Sinclair Lewis

64. “Gosh all fishhooks!” Ted wailed to Eunice, as they wolfed hot chocolate, lumps of nougat, and an assortment of glace nuts, in the mosaic splendor of the Royal Drug Store, “it gets me why Dad doesn’t just pass out from being so poky.”

— Sinclair Lewis

65. “He was afraid that the world struggle today was not of Communism against Fascism, but of tolerance against the bigotry that was preached equally by Communism and Fascism.”

— Sinclair Lewis

66. “For more than a year now, the League of Forgotten Men has warned the politicians, the whole government, that we are sick unto death of being the Dispossessed – and that, at last, we are more than fifty million strong; no whimpering horde, but with the will, the voices, the votes to enforce our sovereignty!”

— Sinclair Lewis

67. “She did her work with the thoroughness of a mind which reveres details and never quite understands them.”

— Sinclair Lewis

68. “Pugnacity is a form of courage, but a very bad form.”

— Sinclair Lewis

69. “HIS march to greatness was not without disastrous stumbling.”

— Sinclair Lewis

70. “If you want to be a writer, learn to type.”

— Sinclair Lewis

71. “Oh, quit it! You’re the possessor of a beautiful wife, a beautiful gas-stove, and you were going to forget all this race-hysteria.”

— Sinclair Lewis

72. “He had expected that traditionally Republican Vermont would give him too drearily easy a task in preaching Trowbridge. What he found was a dismaying preference for the theoretically Democratic Buzz Windrip. And that preference, Doremus perceived, wasn’t even a pathetic trust in Windrip’s promises of Utopian bliss for everyone in general. It was a trust in increased cash for the voter himself, and for his family, very much in particular.”

— Sinclair Lewis

73. “NOW is a fact that cannot be dodged.”

— Sinclair Lewis

74. “Love is the one thing that can really sure-enough lighten all of life’s dark clouds.”

— Sinclair Lewis

75. “People will think they’re electing him to create more economic security. Then watch the Terror! God knows there’s been enough indication that we can have tyranny in America-the fix of the southern share-croppers, the working conditions of the miners and garment-makers, and our keeping Mooney in prison so many years. But wait till Windrip shows us how to say it with machine guns!”

— Sinclair Lewis

76. “If I ever hear that ‘can’t make an omelet’ phrase again, I’ll start doing a little murder myself! It’s used to justify every atrocity under every despotism, Fascist or Nazi, or Communist or American labor war. Omelet! Eggs! By God, sir, men’s souls and blood are not eggshells for tyrants to break!”

— Sinclair Lewis

77. “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.”

— Sinclair Lewis

78. “Do you think it’s so snobbish, to want to see something besides one’s fellow citizens abroad?”

— Sinclair Lewis

79. “What’d you like me to buy you, Nan? Some pearls or – ” She stopped before him, planted her arms akimbo, and spoke furiously. “I am not vot you call a gold-digger! I am not lady enough! If when you get tired of me, you vant to give me a hundred dollars – or fifty – fine. But you must, by God, understand, when Nande Azeredo takes a man, it iss because she likes him! Pearls? What would I do with pearls? Can I eat pearls?”

— Sinclair Lewis

80. “I know the Press only too well. Almost all editors hide away in spider-dens, men without thought of Family or Public Interest or the humble delights of jaunts out-of-doors, plotting how they can put over their lies, and advance their own positions and fill their greedy pocketbooks by calumniating Statesmen who have given their all for the common good and who are vulnerable because they stand out in the fierce Light that beats around the Throne. Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.”

— Sinclair Lewis

81. “He was in stature but a small man, yet remember that so were Napoleon, Lord Beaverbrook, Stephen A. Douglas, Frederick the Great, and the Dr. Goebbels who is privily known throughout Germany as “Wotan’s Mickey Mouse.”

— Sinclair Lewis

82. “She had so painfully reared three sons to be Christian gentlemen that one of them had become an Omaha bartender, one a professor of Greek, and one, Cyrus N. Bogart, a boy of fourteen who was still at home, the most brazen member of the toughest gang in Boytown.”

— Sinclair Lewis

83. “I just wish people wouldn’t quote Lincoln or the Bible, or hang out the flag or the cross, to cover up something that belongs more to the bank-book and the three golden balls.”

— Sinclair Lewis

84. “The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.”

— Sinclair Lewis

85. “I don’t pretend to be a very educated man, except maybe educated in the heart, and in being able to feel for the sorrows and fears of every ornery fellow human being.”

— Sinclair Lewis

86. “In my opinion, what the country needs, first and foremost, is a good, sound, business-like conduct of its affairs. What we need is – a business administration !”

— Sinclair Lewis

87. “But I do know that about ten times as many people find their lives dull, and unnecessarily dull, 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

88. “Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.”

— Sinclair Lewis

89. “Since dictating the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to explain it, God has never done much but creep around and try to catch us disobeying it.”

— Sinclair Lewis

90. “I’m a middle-class intellectual. I’d never call myself any such a damn silly thing, but since you Reds coined it, I’ll have to accept it. That’s my class, and that’s what I’m interested in. The proletarians are probably noble fellows, but I certainly do not think that the interests of the middle-class intellectuals and the proletarians are the same. They want bread. We want – well, all right, say it, we want cake!”

— Sinclair Lewis

91. “I can never forgive evil and lying and cruel means, and still less can I forgive fanatics that use that for an excuse!”

— Sinclair Lewis

92. “Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty cabbage’ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty measles’?”

— Sinclair Lewis

93. “She was a woman with a working brain and no work.”

— Sinclair Lewis

94. “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

95. “You have more people that love you than you know.”

— Sinclair Lewis

96. “Think how much better it is to criticize conventional customs if you yourself live up to them, scrupulously.”

— Sinclair Lewis

97. “Blessed be they who are not Patriots and Idealists, and who do not feel they must dash right in and Do Something About It, something so immediately important that all doubters must be liquidated – tortured – slaughtered! Good old murder, that since the slaying of Abel by Cain has always been the new device by which all oligarchies and dictators have, for all future ages to come, removed opposition!”

— Sinclair Lewis

98. “Like every thoughtful parent in every age of history, Neil consoled himself, “My generation failed, but this new one is going to change the entire world, and go piously to the polls even on rainy election-days, and never drink more than one cocktail, and end all war.”

— Sinclair Lewis

99. “Babbitt knew that in this place of death Paul was already dead. And as he pondered on the train home something in his own self seemed to have died: a loyal and vigorous faith in the goodness of the world, a fear of public disfavor, a pride in success.”

— Sinclair Lewis

100. “Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.”

— Sinclair Lewis