Top 280 Sinclair Lewis Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “No! What I’d really like us to do would be to come out and tell the whole world: ‘Now you boys never mind about the moral side of this. We have power, and power is its own excuse!”

— Sinclair Lewis

205. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “All of them agreed that the working-classes must be kept in their place; and all of them perceived that American Democracy did not imply any equality of wealth, but did demand a wholesome sameness of thought, dress, painting, morals, and vocabulary.”

— Sinclair Lewis

215. “He was in that most blissful condition to which a powerful young man can attain – unrighteous violence in a righteous cause.”

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis

217. “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

218. “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

219. “Why, there’s no country in the world that can get more hysterical – yes, or more obsequious! – than America.”

— Sinclair Lewis

220. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

222. “Doremus understood John Brown much better.”

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis

224. “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

225. “Now you boys never mind about the moral side of this. We have power, and power is its own excuse!”

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis

227. “I shall not be content till this country can produce every single thing we need, even coffee, cocoa, and rubber, and so keep all our dollars at home. If.”

— Sinclair Lewis

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

232. “You see, we don’t like murder as a way of argument – that’s what really marks the Liberal!”

— Sinclair Lewis

233. “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

234. “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

235. “Thus Carol hit upon the tragedy of old age, which is not that it’s less vigorous, but that it is not needed by youth; that its love and prosy sageness, so important a few years ago, so gladly offered now, are rejected with laughter.”

— Sinclair Lewis

236. “So kindly,” Carol mused, “so well meant, so neighborly – and so confoundedly untrue. Is it really my failure, or theirs?”

— Sinclair Lewis

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

240. “Carol was dismayed to find the Christian religion, in America, in the twentieth century, as abnormal as Zoroastrianism – without the splendor.”

— Sinclair Lewis

241. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

243. “They were shelters for sparrows, not homes for warm laughing people.”

— Sinclair Lewis

244. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

246. “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

247. “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

248. “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

249. “She would earn her living.”

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis