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

202. “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

203. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis

206. “As she went dragging through the prickly-hot street she reflected that a citizen of Gopher Prairie does not have jests-he has a jest.”

— Sinclair Lewis

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

226. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis

229. “Doremus understood John Brown much better.”

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis

232. “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

233. “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

234. “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

235. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

237. “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

238. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis

241. “He was the person whom, in any group, you forgot to introduce, then introduced with extra enthusiasm.”

— Sinclair Lewis

242. “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

243. “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

244. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis

247. “He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all. Four hundred pictures all on a wall are four hundred times less interesting than one picture; and no one knows a cafe till he has gone there often enough to know the names of the waiters. These.”

— Sinclair Lewis

248. “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

249. “Actually, the great traveler is usually a small mussy person in a faded green fuzzy hat, inconspicuous in a corner of the steamer bar. He speaks only one language, and that gloomily. He knows all the facts about nineteen countries, except the home-lives, wage- scales, exports, religions, politics, agriculture, history and languages of those countries. He is as valuable as Baedeker in regard to hotels and railroads, only not so accurate.”

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis