299 Quotes by Sinclair Lewis

Of the love-making of Carol and Will Kennicott there is nothing to be told which may not be heard on every summer evening, on every shadowy block.

When Buzz gets in, he won’t be having any parade of wounded soldiers. That’ll be bad Fascist psychology. All those poor devils he’ll hide away in institutions, and just bring out the lively young human slaughter cattle in uniforms.

I’m a middle-class intellectual. I’d never call myself any such a damn silly thing, but since you Reds coined it, I’ll have to accept it. That’s my class, and that’s what I’m interested in. The proletarians are probably noble fellows, but I certainly do not think that the interests of the middle-class intellectuals and the proletarians are the same. They want bread. We want – well, all right, say it, we want cake!

And though he had almost flunked in Greek, his thesis on ‘Sixteen Ways of Paying a Church Debt’ had won the ten-dollar prize in Practical Theology.

We don’t want all this highbrow intellectuality, all this book-learning.

Just as he was an Elk, a Booster, and a member of the Chamber of Commerce, just as the priests of the Presbyterian Church determined his every religious belief and the senators who controlled the Republican Party decided in little smoky rooms in Washington what he should think about disarmament, tariff, and Germany, so did the large national advertisers fix the surface of his life, fix what he believed to be his individuality.

He liked three kinds of films: pretty bathing girls with bare legs; policemen or cowboys and an industrious shooting of revolvers; and funny fat men who ate spaghetti.

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

The hysteria can’t last; be patient, and wait and see, he counseled his readers. It was not that he was afraid of the authorities. He simply did not believe that this comic tyranny could endure. It can’t happen here, said even Doremus – even now.