299 Quotes by Sinclair Lewis

All the Utopias – Brook Farm, Robert Owen’s sanctuary of chatter, Upton Sinclair’s Helicon Hall – and their regulation end in scandal, feuds, poverty, griminess, disillusion.

What are these unheard of sins you condemn so much – and like so well?

He regarded spats, walking sticks, caviar, titles, tea-drinking, poetry not daily syndicated in newspapers, and all foreigners, possibly excepting the British, as degenerate.

West of Chicago, “You bet” means “Rather,” and “Yes indeed,” and “On the whole I should be inclined to fancy that there may be some vestiges of accuracy in your curious opinion,” and “You’re a liar but I can’t afford to say so.

I came trusting them. They beat me with rods of dullness. They don’t know, they don’t understand how agonizing their complacent dullness is. Like ants and August sun on a wound.” – Carol Kennicott.

Call me a socialist or any blame thing you want to, as long as you grab hold of the other end of the cross-cut saw with me and help slash the big logs of Poverty and Intolerance to pieces.

I know the Press only too well. Almost all editors hide away in spider-dens, men without thought of Family or Public Interest or the humble delights of jaunts out-of-doors, plotting how they can put over their lies, and advance their own positions and fill their greedy pocketbooks by calumniating Statesmen who have given their all for the common good and who are vulnerable because they stand out in the fierce Light that beats around the Throne. Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.

But plenty things like this happened before Buzz Windrip ever came in, Doremus,” insisted John Pollikop... “You never thought about them, because they was just routine news, to stick in your paper. Things like the sharecroppers and the Scottsboro boys and the plots of the California wholesalers against the agricultural union and dictatorship in Cuba and the way phony deputies in Kentucky shot striking miners.

I just wish people wouldn’t quote Lincoln or the Bible, or hang out the flag or the cross, to cover up something that belongs more to the bank-book and the three golden balls.