Sinclair Lewis Quotes

153 Sourced Quotes

Indians, of course, have no 'theology,' and indeed no word for the system of credulity in which the white priests arrange for God, who must be entirely bewildered by it, a series of excuses for his failures.

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.

Sinclair Lewis
I have for myself no conceivable complaint to make, and yet for American literature in general, and its standing in a country where industrialism and finance and science flourish and the only arts that are vital and respected are architecture and the film, I have a considerable complaint.

Sinclair Lewis
What are these unheard of sins you condemn so much - and like so well?

Sinclair Lewis
The grateful savants had accepted, and they were spending the rest of their lives reading fifteenth-hand opinions, taking pleasant naps, and drooling out to yawning students the anemic and wordy bookishness which they called learning.

Sinclair Lewis
The driver of the wagon swaying through forest and swamp of the Ohio wilderness was a ragged girl of fourteen.

Sinclair Lewis
Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest; it is an industry.

Sinclair Lewis
He was worried lest during his late discontent he had imperiled his salvation. He was not quite sure there was a Heaven to be attained, but Dr. John Jennison said there was, and Babbitt was not going to take a chance.

Sinclair Lewis
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.

Sinclair Lewis
I've sat at the preachers' feet and listened to them, faithfully, and tried to make myself become what they said I ought to be. I'm through! I do my own thinking now and my own bossing.

Sinclair Lewis
Once she kidnapped me and drug me to the Methodist Church. I goes in, pious as Widow Bogart, and sits still and never cracks a smile while the preacher is favoring us with his misinformation on evolution. But afterwards, when the old stalwarts were pumphandling everybody at the door and calling 'em 'Brother' and 'Sister,' they let me sail right by with nary a clinch.

Sinclair Lewis
"I wonder if you can understand the 'fun' of making a beautiful thing, the pride and satisfaction of it, and the holiness!" The company glanced doubtfully at one another. In Gopher Prairie it is not good form to be holy except at church, between ten-thirty and twelve on Sunday.

Sinclair Lewis
To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead.

Sinclair Lewis
Good sense from a child was not necessarily contemptible beside foolishness from a grown-up.

Sinclair Lewis
He was born to be a senator. He never said anything important, and he always said it sonorously.

Sinclair Lewis
Mostly the adult Indians did not wish their children to learn these arts from the emissaries of what they astonishingly considered an alien, false and hostile God.

Sinclair Lewis
They were newly rich contractors who, having bought houses, motors, hand-painted pictures, and gentlemanliness, were now buying a refined ready-made philosophy. It had been a tossup with them whether to buy New Thought, Christian Science, or a good standard high-church model of Episcopalianism.

Sinclair Lewis
Now we got a lawyer, we got civilization, which I understand to mean that a man has a chance to get rich without working.

Sinclair Lewis
There was much conversation, most of which sounded like the rest of it.

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

Sinclair Lewis