Top 280 Sinclair Lewis Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Those of you who have listened to me before will understand that I – or rather that the League of Forgotten Men – has no quarrel with individual Jews; that we are proud to have Rabbis among our directors; but those subversive international organizations which, unfortunately, are so largely Jewish, must be driven with whips and scorpions from off the face of the earth.”

— Sinclair Lewis

152. “Not individuals but institutions are the enemies, and they most afflict the disciples who the most generously serve them. They insinuate their tyranny under a hundred guises and pompous names, such as Polite Society, the Family, the Church, Sound Business, the Party, the Country, the Superior White Race; and the only defense against them, Carol beheld, was unembittered laughter.”

— Sinclair Lewis

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “What conceivable reason could one have for seeking after righteousness in a world which so hated righteousness?”

— Sinclair Lewis

157. “Honestly, I think that the sense of humor of the people that TALK about having a ‘sense of humor’ is a worse vice than drinking.”

— Sinclair Lewis

158. “In a matter of weeks, he had learned that without suffering and doubt, there can be no whole human being.”

— Sinclair Lewis

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

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. “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

171. “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

172. “Humor is next to Godliness.”

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

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. “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

Featured in: Romance Quotes

179. “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

180. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

187. “He who had been a boy very credulous of life was no longer greatly interested in the possible and improbable adventures of each new day.”

— Sinclair Lewis

188. “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

189. “For they were thieves not only of wages but of honor. To their purpose they could quote not only Scripture but Jefferson.”

— Sinclair Lewis

190. “I decided to leave here. Stern resolution. Grasp the world. Then I found that the Village Virus had me, absolute.”

— Sinclair Lewis

191. “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

192. “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

193. “Why, Windrip’s just something nasty that’s been vomited up. Plenty others still left fermenting in the stomach – quack economists with every sort of economic ptomaine! No, Buzz isn’t important – it’s the sickness that made us throw him up that we’ve got to attend to – the sickness of more than 30 per cent permanently unemployed, and growing larger. Got to cure it!”

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis

195. “Except, perhaps, that he was an atheist in theology, he was a strict orthodox Christian.”

— Sinclair Lewis

196. “Is it just possible,” he sighed, “that the most vigorous and boldest idealists have been the worst enemies of human progress instead of its greatest creators? Possible that plain men with the humble trait of minding their own business will rank higher in the heavenly hierarchy than all the plumed souls who have shoved their way in among the masses and insisted on saving them?”

— Sinclair Lewis

197. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

199. “I pledge myself to serve the Corporate State, the Chief, all Commissioners, the Mystic Wheel, and the troops of the Republic in every thought and deed.”

— Sinclair Lewis

200. “We don’t want all this highbrow intellectuality, all this book-learning. That’s good enough in its way, but isn’t it, after all, just a nice toy for grownups?”

— Sinclair Lewis