Top 107 Quotes & Sayings by Sinclair Lewis

Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know she is better than every other country.

There are two insults no human being will endure: that he has no sense of humor, and that he has never known trouble.

When audiences come to see us authors lecture, it is largely in the hope that we'll be funnier to look at than to read.

Winter is not a season, it's an occupation.

Pugnacity is a form of courage, but a very bad form.

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.

Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.

Damn the great executives, the men of measured merriment, damn the men with careful smiles oh, damn their measured merriment.

Whatever poet, orator or sage may say of it, old age is still old age.

What is love? It is the morning and the evening star.

People will buy anything that is 'one to a customer.'

Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.

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.

The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.

Thus Carol hit upon the tragedy of old age, which is not that it is less vigorous than youth, but that it is not needed by youth.

The Maker of the universe with stars a hundred thousand light-years apart was interested, furious, and very personal about it if a small boy played baseball on Sunday afternoon.

When facism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the American flag.

I love America, but I don't like it.

It has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditation upon the fact that he is better off than others.

The trouble with this country is that there are too many people going about saying, "The trouble with this country is...."

Sleep with me sleep with my dogs-

Love is the one thing that can really sure-enough lighten all of life's dark clouds.

She did her work with the thoroughness of a mind which reveres details and never quite understands them.

Vast is the power of cities to reclaim the wanderer.

NOW is a fact that cannot be dodged.

You have more people that love you than you know.

There are two insults which no human being will endure: The assertion that he hasn't a sense of humor, and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.

Upon this theology he rarely pondered. The kernel of his practical religion was that it was respectable, and beneficial to one's business, to be seen going to services; that the church kept the Worst Elements from being still worse; and that the pastor's sermons, however dull they might seem at the time of taking, yet had a voodooistic power which 'did a fellow good-- kept him in touch with Higher Things.

Men die, but the plutocracy is immortal; and it is necessary that fresh generations should be trained to its service.

My objection to the church isn't that the preachers are cruel, hypocritical, actually wicked, though some of them are that, too - think of how many are arrested for selling fake stock, for seducing 14-year-old girls in orphanages under their care, for arson, for murder. An it isn't so much that the church is in bondage to Big Business and doctrines as laid down by millionaires - though a lot of churches are that, too. My chief objection is that 99% of sermons and Sunday School teachings are so agonizingly dull.

It's one of our favorite American myths that broad plains necessarily make broad minds, and high mountains make high purpose.

There is no greater compliment to the Jews than the fact that the degree of their unpopularity is always the scientific measure of the cruelty and silliness of the regime under which they live.

People will buy anything that is one to a customer.

It is impossible to discourage the real writers - they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write.

Fascism will come to America wrapped in a flag.

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

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 silencing them forever.

It isn't what you earn but how spend it that fixes your class.

Life is hard and astonishingly complicated.... No one great reform will make it easy. Most of us who work -- or want to work -- will always have trouble or discontent. So we must learn to be calm, and train all our faculties, and make others happy.

I think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We're tired of drudging and sleeping and dying. We're tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We're tired of always deferring hope till the next generation. We're tired of hearing politicians and priests and cautious reformers... coax us, 'Be calm! Be patient! Wait! We have the plans for a Utopia already made; just wiser than you.' For ten thousand years they've said that. We want our Utopia now — and we're going to try our hands at it.

Most troubles are unnecessary. We have Nature beaten; we can make her grow wheat; we can keep warm when she sends blizzards. So we raise the devil just for pleasure--wars, politics, race-hatreds, labor-disputes.

Curiously, neither God nor the devil may wear modern dress, but must retain Grecian vestments.

You," Said Dr. Yavitch, "are a middle-road liberal, and you haven't the slightest idea what you want. I, being a revolutionist, know exactly what I want -- and what I want now is a drink.

It is, I think, an error to believe that there is any need of religion to make life seem worth living.

Cure the evils of Democracy by the evils of Fascism! Funny therapeutics! I've heard of their curing syphilis by giving the patient malaria, but I've never heard of their curing malaria by giving the patient syphilis.

You're so earnest about morality that I hate to think how essentially immoral you must be underneath.

What is Love? Listen! It is the rainbow that stands out, in all its glorious many-colored hues, illuminating and making glad again the dark clouds of life. It is the morning and the evening star, that in glad refulgence, there on the awed horizon, call Nature's hearts to an uplifted rejoicing in God's marvelous firmament!

In everything was the spirit of children's play - not the rule-ridden, time-killing play of adults that is a preparation for death, but the busy and credulous play of children that is a preparation for life.

Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.

I must say I'm not very fond of oratory that's so full of energy it hasn't any room for facts.

Writers have a rare power not given to anyone else: we can bore people long after we are dead.

People read fiction for emotion-not information

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

The most important part of living is not the living but the pondering upon it.

Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement of ignorance which is so easy to come by. To be 'intellectual' or 'artistic' or, in their own word, to be 'highbrow,' is to be priggish and of dubious virtue.

A man takes a drink, the drink takes another, and the drink takes the man.

Funny how the world always praises its opera-singers so much and pays 'em so well and then starves its shoemakers, and yet it needs good shoes so much more than it needs opera--or war or fiction.

When fascism comes to the United States it will be wrapped in the American flag and will claim the name of 100-percent Americanism

Since dictating the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to explain it, God has never done much but creep around and try to catch us disobeying it.

Good Lord, I don't know what 'rights' a man has! And I don't know the solution of boredom. If I did, I'd be the one philosopher that had the cure for living. But I do know that about ten times as many people find their lives dull, and unnecessarily dull, as ever admit it; and I do believe that if we busted out and admitted it sometimes, instead of being nice and patient and loyal for sixty years, and then nice and patient and dead for the rest of eternity, why, maybe, possibly, we might make life more fun.