Top 250 Sinclair Lewis Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “In matrimonial geography the distance between the first mute recognition of a break and the admission thereof is as great as the distance between the first naive faith and the first doubting.”

— Sinclair Lewis

152. “Always she had a genius for keeping herself superior to him by just the right comment on his clumsiness, the most delicate and needle- pointed comparison of him with defter men.”

— Sinclair Lewis

153. “And though he had almost flunked in Greek, his thesis on ‘Sixteen Ways of Paying a Church Debt’ had won the ten-dollar prize in Practical Theology.”

— Sinclair Lewis

154. “I must say I’m not very fond of oratory that’s so full of energy it hasn’t any room for facts.”

— Sinclair Lewis

155. “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.”

— Sinclair Lewis

156. “Albert Einstein, who had been exiled from Germany for his guilty devotion to mathematics, world peace, and the violin, was now exiled from America for the same crimes.”

— Sinclair Lewis

157. “Certainly Lewis failed – or refused – to sketch a solution to the threat of fascism. He was a social satirist, not a systematic political thinker or theorist. Worth.”

— Sinclair Lewis

158. “Say, I swear the best Messiah in the whole show is this darky, Father Divine.”

— Sinclair Lewis

159. “What are these unheard of sins you condemn so much – and like so well?”

— Sinclair Lewis

160. “I wouldn’t care whether it was a laboratory or a carnival. But it’s merely safe. Tell me, Mr. Pollock, what is the matter with Gopher Prairie?”

— Sinclair Lewis

161. “When Buzz gets in, he won’t be having any parade of wounded soldiers. That’ll be bad Fascist psychology. All those poor devils he’ll hide away in institutions, and just bring out the lively young human slaughter cattle in uniforms.”

— Sinclair Lewis

162. “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.”

— Sinclair Lewis

163. “He liked three kinds of films: pretty bathing girls with bare legs; policemen or cowboys and an industrious shooting of revolvers; and funny fat men who ate spaghetti.”

— Sinclair Lewis

164. “It was a town of perhaps ten thousand souls, inhabiting about twenty thousand bodies – the proportion of soul-possession may be too high.”

— Sinclair Lewis

165. “Authors have the power to bore people long after we are dead. –.”

— Sinclair Lewis

166. “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.”

— Sinclair Lewis

167. “Funny how the world always praises its opera-singers so much and pays ’em so well and then starves its shoemakers, and yet it needs good shoes so much more than it needs opera – or war or fiction.”

— Sinclair Lewis

168. “It might be the doing of Satan, in whom Aaron anxiously believed with all of his being except, perhaps, his mind.”

— Sinclair Lewis

169. “The fact that none of these civic worriers had ever heard of such a case was unimportant, because they all had heard of somebody who had heard of it!”

— Sinclair Lewis

170. “After his remarks upon suffrage he abruptly questioned her about herself. His kindliness and the firmness of his personality enveloped her and she accepted him as one who had a right to know what she thought and wore and ate and read. He was positive. He had grown from a sketched-in stranger to a friend, whose gossip was important news. She noticed the healthy solidity of his chest. His nose, which had seemed irregular and large, was suddenly virile.”

— Sinclair Lewis

171. “He was not only 100 per cent American; he exacted 40 per cent of chauvinistic interest on top of the principal. He was on every occasion heard to say, “We ought to keep all these foreigners out of the country, and what I mean, the Kikes just as much as the Wops and Hunkies and Chinks.”

— Sinclair Lewis

172. “Humor is next to Godliness.”

— Sinclair Lewis

173. “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

174. “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.”

— Sinclair Lewis

175. “He was permitted, without restriction, to speak of himself as immoral, agnostic and socialistic, so long as it was universally known that he remained pure, Presbyterian, and Republican.”

— Sinclair Lewis

176. “Pictures? Why talk stupidly about pictures when he could talk intelligently about engines? Languages? If he had nothing to say, what was the good of saying it in three languages? Manners? These presumable dukes and dignitaries whom he was passing on Pall Mall might be able to enter a throne-room more loftily, but he didn’t want to enter a throne-room.”

— Sinclair Lewis

177. “He regarded spats, walking sticks, caviar, titles, tea-drinking, poetry not daily syndicated in newspapers, and all foreigners, possibly excepting the British, as degenerate.”

— Sinclair Lewis

178. “Jessup was a littlish man, skinny, smiling, well tanned, with a small gray mustache, a small and well-trimmed gray beard – in a community where to sport a beard was to confess one’s self a farmer, a Civil War veteran, or a Seventh Day Adventist. Doremus’s detractors said that he maintained the beard just to be “highbrow” and “different,” to try to appear “artistic.” Possibly they were right.”

— Sinclair Lewis

179. “In some respects, writing was his only form of human interaction.”

— Sinclair Lewis

180. “Call me a socialist or any blame thing you want to, as long as you grab hold of the other end of the cross-cut saw with me and help slash the big logs of Poverty and Intolerance to pieces.”

— Sinclair Lewis

181. “The hysteria can’t last; be patient, and wait and see, he counseled his readers. It was not that he was afraid of the authorities. He simply did not believe that this comic tyranny could endure. It can’t happen here, said even Doremus – even now.”

— Sinclair Lewis

182. “I came trusting them. They beat me with rods of dullness. They don’t know, they don’t understand how agonizing their complacent dullness is. Like ants and August sun on a wound.” – Carol Kennicott.”

— Sinclair Lewis

183. “West of Chicago, “You bet” means “Rather,” and “Yes indeed,” and “On the whole I should be inclined to fancy that there may be some vestiges of accuracy in your curious opinion,” and “You’re a liar but I can’t afford to say so.”

— Sinclair Lewis

184. “As a newspaper man, Doremus remembered that the only reporters who misrepresented and concealed facts more unscrupulously than the Capitalists were the Communists.”

— Sinclair Lewis

185. “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

186. “You poor kids! You talking children, that don’t know anything about anything that matters! Don’t you see? I can’t play either of your games. I’m ME! I’m going to be me! Oh, if you do love me a little, let me be me! Good-by.”

— Sinclair Lewis

187. “Once upon a time in America there was a scholar who conducted a one-man revolution and won it. There.”

— Sinclair Lewis

188. “I don’t altogether admire everything Germany and Italy have done, but you’ve got to hand it to ’em, they’ve been honest enough and realistic enough to say to the other nations, ‘Just tend to your own.”

— Sinclair Lewis

189. “What conceivable reason could one have for seeking after righteousness in a world which so hated righteousness? Why do anything except eat and read and make love and provide for sleep that should be secure against disturbance by armed policemen? He never did find any particularly good reason. He simply went on.”

— Sinclair Lewis

190. “Foolish was a reliable combination of English setter, Airedale, cocker spaniel, wistful doe, and rearing hyena.”

— Sinclair Lewis

191. “To George F. Babbitt, as to most prosperous citizens of Zenith, his motor car was poetry and tragedy, love and heroism. The office was his pirate ship but the car his perilous excursion ashore.”

— Sinclair Lewis

192. “My one ambition is to get all Americans to realize that they are, and must continue to be, the greatest Race on the face of this old Earth, and second, to realize that whatever apparent Differences there may be among us, in wealth, knowledge, skill, ancestry or strength – though, of course, all this does not apply to people who are racially different from us – we are all brothers, bound together in the great and wonderful bond of National Unity, for which we should all be very glad.”

— Sinclair Lewis

193. “We ought to keep all these foreigners out of the country, and what I mean, the Kikes just as much as the Wops and Hunkies and Chinks.”

— Sinclair Lewis

194. “Democracy – here and in Britain and France, it hasn’t been so universal a sniveling slavery as Naziism in Germany, such an imagination-hating, pharisaic materialism as Russia – even if it has produced industrialists like you, Frank, and bankers like you, R. C., and given you altogether too much power and money. On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy’s given the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had.”

— Sinclair Lewis

195. “Father, thou hast forgiven too long. Forgive them not, but curse them, for they know what they do.”

— Sinclair Lewis

196. “Don’t be scared of upsetting folks ’coz most of ’em are topsy-turvy anyway, and you’ll only be putting ’em back on their feet.”

— Sinclair Lewis

197. “But she knew that she still had no plan in life, save always to go along the same streets, past the same people, to the same shops.”

— Sinclair Lewis

198. “His name was George F. Babbitt. He was forty-six years old now, in April, 1920, and he made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry, but he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.”

— Sinclair Lewis

199. “I’m not a humming-bird. I’m a hawk; a tiny leashed hawk, pecked to death by these large, white, flabby, wormy hens.”

— Sinclair Lewis

200. “God, sir, men’s souls and blood are not eggshells for tyrants to break!”

— Sinclair Lewis