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Organic chemistry! Puzzle chemistry! Stink chemistry! Drug-store chemistry! Physical chemistry is power, it is exactness, it is life.
Sinclair Lewis
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Paris is one of the largest, and certainly it is the pleasantest, of modern American cities.
Sinclair Lewis
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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.
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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
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Curiously, neither God nor the devil may wear modern dress, but must retain Grecian vestments.
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"The regularity of the rate at which the strepolysin disappears suggests that an equation may be found." "Then why did you not make the equation?" "Well — I don't know. I wasn't enough of a mathematician." "Then you should not have published till you knew your math!"
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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.
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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.
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To be a scientist — it is not just a different job so that a man should choose between being a scientist and being an explorer or a bond-salesman or a physician or a king or a farmer. It is a tangle of very obscure emotions, like mysticism, or wanting to write poetry; it makes its victim all different from the good natural man.
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If there is anything worse than the aching tedium of staring out of car windows, it is the irritation of getting tickets, packing, finding trains, lying in bouncing berths, washing without water, digging out passports, and fighting through customs. To live in Carlsbad is seemly and to loaf at San Remo healing to the soul, but to get from Carlsbad to San Remo is of the devil.
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He fretted that he did not know anything. He sighed, 'I have sought the Kingdom of God a little, the Squire has sought it terribly, but we haven't even a map, and after what I saw this afternoon, I know the Sioux are as barbarous as we are. 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?
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You have curiosity and you are stubborn. You do not accept rules. Therefore I t'ink you will either make a very good scientist or a very bad one, and if you are bad enough, you will be popular with the rich ladies who rule this city, New York, and you can give lectures for a living or even become, if you get to be plausible enough, a college president. So anyway, it will be interesting.
Sinclair Lewis
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When you think that most of us are doomed by divine grace to roast in hell, to say nothing of mortgages and hail and bad crops and extravagant womenfolks, 'tain't any laughing matter!
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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.
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Pickerbaugh apparently believed that this research would take six weeks; Martin had hoped to do it in two years; and with the present interruptions it would require two hundred.
Sinclair Lewis
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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.
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It might be the doing of Satan, in whom Aaron anxiously believed with all of his being except, perhaps, his mind.
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The reason for it all, nobody who is actually engaged in it can tell you, except the bosses, who believe that these sacred rites of composing dull letters and solemnly filing them away are observed in order that they may buy the large automobiles in which they do not have time to take the air.
Sinclair Lewis
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A sensational event was changing from the brown suit to the gray the contents of his pockets. He was earnest about these objects. They were of eternal importance, like baseball or the Republican Party.
Sinclair Lewis
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There are two races of people, only two, and they live side by side. His calls mine 'neurotic'; mine calls his 'stupid'.
Sinclair Lewis
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The normal man, he does not care much what he does except that he should eat and sleep and make love. But the scientist is intensely religious — he is so religious that he will not accept quarter truths, because they are an insult to his faith.
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Being a man given to oratory and high principles, he enjoyed the sound of his own vocabulary and the warmth of his own virtue.
Sinclair Lewis
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Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest; it is an industry.
Sinclair Lewis
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His entire system of theology was comprised in the Bible, which he never read, and the Methodist Church, which he rarely attended.
Sinclair Lewis
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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
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Quote of the day
Now if the harvest is over, And the world cold, Give me the bonus of laughter, As I lose hold.
John Betjeman
Sinclair Lewis
Born:
February 7, 1885
Died:
January 10, 1951
(aged 65)
Bio:
Harry Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright.
Known for:
Babbitt (1922)
Main Street (1920)
It Can't Happen Here (1935)
Arrowsmith (1925)
Dodsworth (1929)
Most used words:
god
men
people
ten
church
year
bible
life
damn
hell
persons
live
rich
thought
white
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Upton Sinclair
American Journalist
Ernest Hemingway
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F. Scott Fitzgerald
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