Quotes from Sinclair Lewis

Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn reasonable and become your enemies, one quarter are afraid to stop and speak and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed final quarter keep you alive.

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.

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.

Why, there's no country in the world that can get more hysterical—yes, or more obsequious!—than America.

Why, there's no country in the world that can get more hysterical—yes, or more obsequious!—than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch

the Fundamentalists' crusade. (Outrageous! from the leonine gentleman.) They were mild enough now; they spoke in the name of virtue; but give them rope, and there would be a new Inquisition, a new hunting of witches.

Doremus understood John Brown much better.

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.

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.

cigar, and walked up and down before the house, a portly

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.

They took it, too, like Napoleon's soldiers. And they had the Jews and the Negroes to look down on, more and more. The M.M.'s saw to that. Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on. *

his writings to elicit a sense of realism while inspiring a call for social change.

It was said that one of the least of these erring children was the first patriot to name President Windrip the Chief, meaning Führer, or Imperial Wizard of the K.K.K., or Il Duce, or Imperial Potentate of the Mystic Shrine, or Commodore, or University Coach, or anything else supremely noble and good-hearted.

his writings to elicit a sense of realism while inspiring a call for social change. Class, gender, and sexual preference were themes that he cared about, and he showed his readers that none of these factors actually mattered.

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!

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

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

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

dull and repetitive lifestyle.

I tell you, an honest man gets sick when he hears the word 'Liberty' today, after what the Republicans did to it!

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.

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

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