299 Quotes by Sinclair Lewis

I’m not sure that I shall. I’m trying to develop my own large capacity for dullness and contentment. I’ve failed at every positive thing I’ve tried. I’d better ‘settle down,’ as they call it, and be satisfied to be – nothing.

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.

More and more, as I think about history, 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.

It was a town of perhaps ten thousand souls, inhabiting about twenty thousand bodies – the proportion of soul-possession may be too high.

Cure the evils of Democracy by the evils of Fascism! Funny therapeutics.

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

Life is comfortable and clean enough here already. And so secure. What it needs it to be less secure, more eager.

He was in stature but a small man, yet remember that so were Napoleon, Lord Beaverbrook, Stephen A. Douglas, Frederick the Great, and the Dr. Goebbels who is privily known throughout Germany as “Wotan’s Mickey Mouse.

In my opinion, what the country needs, first and foremost, is a good, sound, business-like conduct of its affairs. What we need is – a business administration !