Quotes from Sinclair Lewis

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 country store.

Father, thou hast forgiven too long. Forgive them not, but curse them, for they know what they do.

Once upon a time in America there was a scholar who conducted a one-man revolution and won it. There

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.

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.

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.

Is it just possible 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 savings them?

I pledge myself to serve the Corporate State, the Chief, all Commissioners, the Mystic Wheel, and the troops of the Republic in every thought and deed.

Always she had a genius for keeping herself superior to him by just the right comment on his clumsiness, the most delicate and needle- pointed comparison of him with defter men.

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

They had something to do. They could escape from themselves.

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.

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.

I know, but the poor souls – Well, I'm sure you will agree with me in one thing: The chief task of a librarian is to get people to read." "You feel so? My feeling, Mrs. Kennicott, and I am merely quoting the librarian of a very large college, is that he first duty of the conscientious librarian is to preserve the books.

I am convinced that everything that is worth while in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever. But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and of silencing them forever.

And you want to 'reform' people like that when dynamite is so cheap?

I wonder if the small town isn't, with some lovely exceptions, a social appendix?

Fine, large, meaningless, general terms like romance and business can always be related. They take the place of thinking, and are highly useful to optimists and lecturers.

I decided to leave here. Stern resolution. Grasp the world. Then I found that the Village Virus had me, absolute.

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.

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.

Gosh all fishhooks! Ted wailed to Eunice, as they wolfed hot chocolate, lumps of nougat, and an assortment of glace nuts, in the mosaic splendor of the Royal Drug Store, it gets me why Dad doesn't just pass out from being so poky.

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

It is an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear respectable. It is contentment . . . the contentment of quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is dullness made God.