Sinclair Lewis quotes - page 2

It is impossible to discourage the real writers - they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write. (Sinclair Lewis)
Fortune has dealt with me rather too well. I have known little struggle, not much poverty, many generosities. Now and then I have, for my books or myself, been somewhat warmly denounced - there was one good pastor in California who upon reading my Elmer Gantry desired to lead a mob and lynch me, while another holy man in the state of Maine wondered if there was no respectable and righteous way of putting me in jail. View quote
Sinclair Lewis
For many minutes, for many hours, for a bleak eternity, he lay awake, shivering, reduced to primitive terror, comprehending that he had won freedom, and wondering what he could do with anything so unknown and so embarrassing as freedom. View quote
Sinclair Lewis
He prayed, 'Lord God, let us be the kind of Christians that you would be if you were a Christian'. View quote
Sinclair Lewis
I don't believe in fear of divine vengeance, and I do believe in justice and equality.... View quote
Sinclair Lewis
It came to him merely to run away was folly, because he could never run away from himself. View quote
Sinclair Lewis
I hate your city. It has standardized all the beauty out of life. It is one big railroad station-with all the people taking tickets for the best cemeteries. View quote
Sinclair Lewis
Is it possible that nobody has ever known-that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won't be for another thousand years? View quote
Sinclair Lewis
They've worked out elaborate charts classifying all intellectual occupations and interests, with the methods and materials and tools, and especially the goals-the aims, the ideals, the moral purposes-that are suited to each of them. Really tremendous! Why, a musician or an engineer, for example, could look at his chart and tell accurately whether he was progressing fast enough, at his age, and if not, just what his trouble was, and the remedy. View quote
Sinclair Lewis
Hours then of blasphemy and fury and debate, all in the theological terms that seem shocking to the literate citizens today, who believe in God but just don't care to mention him or any of the other lowly friends they knew before they went to Yale. View quote
Sinclair Lewis
With... small-town life... there are hundreds of thousands... who are not content. The more intelligent young people... flee to the cities... and... stay there, seldom returning even for holidays. The reason, Carol insisted... 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 the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is the slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is dullness made God. A savorless people, gulping tasteless food and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking-chairs prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world. (Sinclair Lewis)
Like all ardent agnostics, Martin was a religious man. View quote
Sinclair Lewis
He still had a fragment of his boyhood belief that congressmen were persons of intelligence and importance. View quote
Sinclair Lewis
Probably none of the Weagles gave five minutes' thought a year to theology or ecclesiology, except Ora, who occasionally stirred up a lot of interesting family irritation by announcing that he was going to become a Catholic, an Episcopalian, a Buddhist, or a Seventh Day Adventist. View quote
Sinclair Lewis
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. 'Nother words, have a doctor who won't take any back-chat, but really boss the patient and make him get well whether he likes it or not! View quote
Sinclair Lewis
What had he learned? Enough Hebrew and Greek to be able to crawl through the Bible by using lexicons-so that, like all his classmates once they were out of the seminary, he always read it in English. A good many of the more condemnatory texts of the Bible-rather less than the average Holy Roller carpenter-evangelist. The theory that India and Africa have woes because they are not Christianized, but that Christianized Bangor and Des Moines have woes because the devil, a being obviously more potent than omnipotent God, sneaks around counteracting the work of Baptist preachers. View quote
Sinclair Lewis
Reverend Lucius Fairlow... a mild-spoken young-old man with mild chestnut hair and a mild chestnut mustache and a conservative theology which stuck mildly to the pleasant certainties of God's anger and eternal hellfire. View quote
Sinclair Lewis
A proper school should teach nothing but bookkeeping, agriculture, geometry, dead languages made deader by leaving out all the amusing literature, and the Hebrew Bible as interpreted by men superbly trained to ignore contradictions, men technically called "Fundamentalists." View quote
Sinclair Lewis
It is not known whether Martin ever completely accepted as a gentleman-scholar the Clay Tredgold who was devoted to everything about astronomy except studying it. View quote
Sinclair Lewis
Maybe if they didn't know it beforehand, they wouldn't find out I'd ever been guilty of trying to think for myself. View quote
Sinclair Lewis
It has been calculated that ninety-three million women in all parts of the world have ruined their complexions, and therefore, their souls, by Pemberton's creams and lotions for saving the same; and that nearly three-tenths of the alcohol consumed in prohibition counties is obtained in Pemberton's tonics and blood-builders and women's specifics, the last being regarded by large farmers with beards as especially tasty and stimulating. (Sinclair Lewis)
Rev. Mr. Monday, the Prophet of Punch, has shown that he is the world's greatest salesman of salvation, and that by efficient organization the overhead of spiritual regeneration may be kept down to an unprecedented rock-bottom basis. He has converted over two hundred thousand lost and priceless souls at an average cost of less than ten dollars a head. View quote
Sinclair Lewis
Mr. Wilkins came back and hemmed and hawed a good deal; he praised the work she hadn't considered well done, and pointed out faults in what she considered particularly clever achievements. View quote
Sinclair Lewis
The more the Dakota have to do with the white, the worse. The whites give him whiskey to get his furs and bimeby he don't want to trap so many furst but he want plenty more whiskey. The white traders take his girl, and all he get in swap is a disease. They take his land, and all he get is a leetle annuity so he don't do any work and starve slow. The Indian gets white man's gun an he is drunk and kill his own brother and they call him sinful. That's what he get from the white man-fine kettle, fine gun, fine blanket, the big pox, the small pox and religion. View quote
Sinclair Lewis
Aaron had learned... from Mr. Fairlow's two-hour sermons on "The Jealousy of an Angry Jehovah Who Hath Weighed Sinners in the Balance and Found Them Wanting",... that God was a torturer who punished small boys for sins they might commit later. View quote
Sinclair Lewis