Quotes from Sinclair Lewis

a great nation must go on arming itself more and more, not for conquest—not for jealousy—not for war—but for peace!

He who had been a boy very credulous of life was no longer greatly interested in the possible and improbable adventures of each new day.

I'm not a humming-bird. I'm a hawk; a tiny leashed hawk, pecked to death by these large, white, flabby, wormy hens.

Carol was discovering that the one thing that can be more disconcerting than intelligent hatred is demanding love.

Certainly Lewis failed—or refused—to sketch a solution to the threat of fascism. He was a social satirist, not a systematic political thinker or theorist. Worth

He regarded spats, walking sticks, caviar, titles, tea-drinking, poetry not daily syndicated in newspapers, and all foreigners, possibly excepting the British, as degenerate.

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.

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

Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition—shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor—no, that couldn't happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! We're ready to start on a Children's Crusade—only of adults—right now, and the Right Reverend

Mary was the wife of Fowler Greenhill, M.D., of Fort Beulah, a gay and hustling medico, a choleric and red-headed young man, who was a wonder-worker in typhoid, acute appendicitis, obstetrics, compound fractures, and diets for anemic children.

He grinned and knee-patted and back-slapped; and few of his visitors, once they had talked with him, failed to look upon him as their Little Father and to support him forever. . .. The few who did fail, most of them newspapermen, disliked the smell of him more than before they had met him. . .. Even they, by the unusual spiritedness and color of their attacks upon him, kept his name alive in every column. . ..

he delighted in failing to tell cook that the peas were now ripe, and he was given to shooting cats, stray dogs, chipmunks, and honey-voiced blackbirds. At least twice a day, Doremus resolved to fire him, but—— Perhaps he was telling himself the truth when he insisted that it was amusing to try to civilize this prize bull.

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

Doremus declared that the house was ugly, "but ugly in a nice way.

As a newspaper man, Doremus remembered that the only reporters who misrepresented and concealed facts more unscrupulously than the Capitalists were the Communists.

WHAT WE TEACH YOU How to address your lodge. How to give toasts. How to tell dialect stories. How to propose to a lady. How to entertain banquets. How to make convincing selling-talks. How to build big vocabulary. How to create a strong personality. How to become a rational, powerful and original thinker. How to be a MASTER MAN!

Foolish was a reliable combination of English setter, Airedale, cocker spaniel, wistful doe, and rearing hyena.

I wrote 'It Can't Happen Here,' but I began to think it certainly can.

She watched the hulk of marriage drifting down on her frail speed-boat of aspiration, and steered in desperate circles.

bouncing old retired general--he's dotty over motors. Roars around on a shocking old motor bike--mustache and dignity flying in the morning breeze--atrocious bills for all the geese and curates he runs over.

And for all her theoretical desire to make their house a refuge for him and for whomever he liked to invite, she had never learned to keep her opinions of people to herself. When she was bored by callers, she would beg Do you mind if I run up to bed now--such a headache, with a bright friendliness which fooled no one save herself, and which left their guests chilled and awkward.

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.

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

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.