Top 280 Sinclair Lewis Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “He noted that most of the men of the country club set, including himself, drank too much. And they talked too much about drinking too much. Prohibition had turned drinking from an agreeable, not very important accompaniment to gossip into a craze. They were jumpy about it, and as fascinated as a schoolboy peering at obscene posters.”

— Sinclair Lewis

252. “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

253. “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

254. “They never learned whether she was in trade, living on alimony, or possessed of a family income. Sam suspected that she was an international spy. She was a pleasant woman, and very clever. She talked about herself constantly, and never told anything whatever about herself.”

— Sinclair Lewis

255. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis

258. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

260. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

265. “She would earn her living.”

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis

267. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

276. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

278. “Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours!”

— Sinclair Lewis

279. “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

280. “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