Top 250 Sinclair Lewis Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 5 of 6

201. “Doremus declared that the house was ugly, “but ugly in a nice way.”

— Sinclair Lewis

202. “He had never found that more than five whiskeys and soda were beneficial to law-practice.”

— Sinclair Lewis

203. “Elmer Gantry was drunk. He was eloquently drunk, lovingly and pugnaciously drunk.”

— Sinclair Lewis

204. “I tell you, an honest man gets sick when he hears the word ‘Liberty’ today, after what the Republicans did to it!”

— Sinclair Lewis

205. “Why are you so afraid of the word ‘Fascism,’ Doremus? Just a word – just a word! And might not be so bad, with all the lazy bums we got panhandling relief nowadays, and living on my income tax and yours – not so worse to have a real Strong Man, like Hitler or Mussolini – like Napoleon or Bismarck in the good old days – and have ’em really run the country and make it efficient and prosperous again.”

— Sinclair Lewis

206. “Not answering him at all, Sarason demanded that, in order to bring and hold all elements in the country together by that useful Patriotism which always appears upon threat of an outside attack, the government immediately arrange to be insulted and menaced in a well-planned series of deplorable “incidents” on the Mexican border, and declare war on Mexico as soon as America showed that it was getting hot and patriotic enough.”

— Sinclair Lewis

207. “Every moment everyone felt fear, nameless and omnipresent. They were as jumpy as men in a plague district. Any sudden sound, any unexplained footstep, any unfamiliar script on an envelope, made them startle; and for months they never felt secure enough to let themselves go, in complete sleep. And with the coming of fear went out their pride.”

— Sinclair Lewis

208. “It was a downy town, a drowsy town, a town of security and tradition, which still believed in Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, Memorial Day, and to which May Day was not an occasion for labor parades but for distributing small baskets of flowers.”

— Sinclair Lewis

209. “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

210. “He even got used to living in a lack of privacy like that of a monkey in a Zoo. After a time he could without self-consciousness sit and read the Paris editions.”

— Sinclair Lewis

211. “Maud’s manner indicated that the falsity of the story was an insignificant flaw in its general delightfulness.”

— Sinclair Lewis

212. “She was credulous, perhaps; a born hero-worshipper; yet she did question and examine unceasingly.”

— Sinclair Lewis

213. “Yet all this while the power of thought, the pull of conscience, were feeble beside Alverna’s youth. It was his first love; the first time in his life that he had been roused to through away caution and dignity.”

— Sinclair Lewis

214. “I wonder if the small town isn’t, with some lovely exceptions, a social appendix?”

— Sinclair Lewis

215. “With the loneliness of one who has put away a possible love Carol saw that he was a stranger. She saw that he had never been anything but a frame on which she had hung shining garments.”

— Sinclair Lewis

216. “Women, she pointed out, had done nothing with the vote. If the United States had only listened to her back in 1919 she could have saved them all this trouble. No. Certainly not. No votes.”

— Sinclair Lewis

217. “Any person advocating Communism, Socialism, or Anarchism, advocating refusal to enlist in case of war, or advocating alliance with Russia in any war whatsoever, shall be subject to trial for high treason, with a minimum penalty of twenty years at hard labor in prison, and a maximum of death on the gallows, or other form of execution which the judges may find convenient.”

— Sinclair Lewis

218. “When Myra appeared she said at once, “Now, we want you boys to go on playing around just as if we weren’t here.” The first evening, he stayed out for poker with the guides, and she said in placid merriment, “My! You’re a regular bad one!” The second evening, she groaned sleepily, “Good heavens, are you going to be out every single night?” The third evening, he didn’t play poker.”

— Sinclair Lewis

219. “This was infuriating, because none of their rights as American citizens was better established, or more often used, than the privilege of being ill.”

— Sinclair Lewis

220. “She knew that there was nothing heroic or obviously dramatic in it, no magic of rare hours, nor valiant challenge, but it seemed to her that she was of some significance because she was commonplaceness, the ordinary life of the age, made articulate and protesting.”

— Sinclair Lewis

221. “But he saw now that he must remain alone, a “Liberal,” scorned by all the noisier prophets for refusing to be a willing cat for the busy monkeys of either side. But at worst, the Liberals, the Tolerant, might in the long run preserve some of the arts of civilization, no matter which brand of tyranny should finally dominate the world.”

— Sinclair Lewis

222. “For even with an army of slaves, it was necessary to persuade them that they were freemen and fighters for the principle of freedom, or otherwise the scoundrels might cross over and join the enemy!”

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis

224. “Oh, well, Doremus reflected, he had lived with Emma for thirty-four years, and not oftener than once or twice a year had he wanted to murder her.”

— Sinclair Lewis

225. “It is composed of females who spend one half their waking hours boasting of being descended from the seditious American colonists of 1776, and the other and more ardent half in attacking all contemporaries who believe in precisely the principles for which those ancestors.”

— Sinclair Lewis

226. “What nasty men! I do hope they get shot soon,” which for Mrs. Candy was a startlingly long and humanitarian statement.”

— Sinclair Lewis

227. “Always she was disappointed, but always she effervesced anew –.”

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis

229. “He believed that dissent – even a cranky, erratic, eccentric, old-fashioned version of it – was not disloyalty but at the heart of an American democratic identity.”

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis

231. “They were brave and romantic, tragic and distinguished, and Doremus became a little sick of them all and of the final brutality of fact that no normal man can very long endure another’s tragedy, and that friendly weeping will some day turn to irritated kicking.”

— Sinclair Lewis

232. “Day on day he waited. 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. Waiting, and its brother death, seem so contented.”

— Sinclair Lewis

233. “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

234. “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.”

— Sinclair Lewis

235. “It had been cold in Vermont, with early snow, but the white drifts lay to the earth so quietly, in unstained air, that the world seemed a silver-painted carnival, left to silence. Even on a moonless night, a pale radiance came from the snow, from the earth itself, and the stars were drops of quicksilver.”

— Sinclair Lewis

236. “America, like England and Scotland, had never really been a gay nation. Rather it had been heavily and noisily jocular, with a substratum of worry and insecurity, in the image of its patron saint, Lincoln of the rollicking stories and the tragic heart. But at least there had been hearty greetings, man to man; there had been clamorous jazz for dancing, and the lively, slangy catcalls of young people, and the nervous blatting of tremendous traffic.”

— Sinclair Lewis

237. “Blodgett College is on the edge of Minneapolis. It is a bulwark of sound religion. It is still combating the recent heresies of Voltaire, Darwin, and Robert Ingersoll. Pious families in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, the Dakotas send their children thither, and Blodgett protects them from the wickedness of the universities.”

— Sinclair Lewis

238. “7 per cent of all the families in the country earned $500 a year or less – remember, those weren’t the unemployed, on relief; those were the guys that had the honor of still doing honest labor.”

— Sinclair Lewis

239. “It was Father Charles Coughlin, of Detroit, who had first thought out the device of freeing himself from any censorship of his political sermons on the Mount by “buying his own time on the air” – it being only in the twentieth century that mankind has been able to buy Time as it buys soap and gasoline. This invention was almost equal, in its effect on all American life and thought, to Henry Ford’s early conception of selling cars cheap to millions of people, instead of selling a few as luxuries.”

— Sinclair Lewis

240. “She would earn her living.”

— Sinclair Lewis

241. “She noted that the few people whom they passed wore their raggedest coats for the evil day.”

— Sinclair Lewis

242. “She was like the revolutionist at fifty: not afraid of death, but bored by the probability of bad steaks and bad breaths and sitting up all night on windy barricades.”

— Sinclair Lewis

243. “But the bird’s trilling, the dependable presence of Foolish, comforted Doremus, made military drill and belching politicians seem unimportant and in security he dropped asleep in the worn brown leather chair.”

— Sinclair Lewis

244. “The smallness of the school, the fewness of rivals, permitted her to experiment with her perilous versatility.”

— Sinclair Lewis

245. “An upland hollow and mist beneath the moon – a veil of mist over apple blossoms and the heavy bloom of an ancient lilac bush beside the ruin of a farmhouse burned these sixty years and more.”

— Sinclair Lewis

246. “With all his amateurish fumbling, Martin had one characteristic without which there can be no science: a wide-ranging, sniffing, snuffling, undignified, unselfdramatizing curiosity, and it drove him on.”

— Sinclair Lewis

247. “Harry Sinclair Lewis was born on February 7, 1885 in Minnesota.”

— Sinclair Lewis

248. “American whose fathers have lived in the country for over two generations is so utterly different from any other American.”

— Sinclair Lewis

249. “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

250. “Thus she triumphed through the class, which was a typical Blodgett contest between a dreary teacher and unwilling children of twenty, won by the teacher because his opponents had to answer his questions, while their treacherous queries he could counter by demanding, “Have you looked that up in the library? Well then, suppose you do!”

— Sinclair Lewis