Top 280 Sinclair Lewis Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “The smallness of the school, the fewness of rivals, permitted her to experiment with her perilous versatility.”

— Sinclair Lewis

252. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis

260. “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

261. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

268. “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

269. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

271. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis

274. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

276. “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

277. “She would earn her living.”

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis

279. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis