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. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis

220. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

222. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis

225. “I don’t mean to say we’re perfect. We’ve got a lot to do in the way of extending the paving of motor boulevards, for, believe me, it’s the fellow with four to ten thousand a year, say, and an automobile and a nice little family in a bungalow on the edge of town, that makes the wheels of progress go round!”

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis

227. “The gospel crew could never consider their converts as human beings, like waiters or manicurists or brakemen, but they had in them such a professional interest as surgeons take in patients, critics in an author, fishermen in trout.”

— Sinclair Lewis

228. “We cannot too strongly condemn the un-Christian attitude of certain otherwise progressive nations in their discriminations against the Jews, who have been among the strongest supporters of the League, and who will continue to prosper and to be recognized as fully Americanized, though only so long as they continue to support our ideals.”

— Sinclair Lewis

229. “Lewis was an extremely cold, stern, and business-minded man.”

— Sinclair Lewis

230. “Is it just possible,′ he sighed, ’that the most vigorous and obldest idealists have been the worst enemies of human progress instead of its greatest creators?”

— Sinclair Lewis

231. “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

232. “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

233. “For the first time in America, except during the Civil War and the World War, people were afraid to say whatever came to their tongues.”

— Sinclair Lewis

234. “To be “intellectual” or “artistic” or, in their own word, to be “highbrow,” is to be priggish and of dubious virtue.”

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis

236. “Doremus understood John Brown much better.”

— Sinclair Lewis

237. “Manhattan peasants. Kind people, industrious people, generous to their aged, eager to find any desperate cure for the sickness of worry over losing the job. Most facile material for any rabble-rouser.”

— Sinclair Lewis

238. “They had something to do. They could escape from themselves.”

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis

241. “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

242. “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

243. “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

244. “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

245. “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

246. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

248. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

250. “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