Famous quotes

Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide

English Italiano Polski עברית Français Português فارسی Español 中文 Русский Deutsch العربية हिन्दी 日本語 Ελληνικά Latina

Sinclair Lewis

124 quotes

“There was much conversation, most of which sounded like the rest of it. ~ Ch. 14”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Like all ardent agnostics, Martin was a religious man. ~ Ch. 16”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is one of the major tragedies that nothing is more discomforting than the hearty affection of the Old Friends who never were friends. ~ Ch. 20”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He preached to himself, as Max Gottlieb had once preached to him, the loyalty of dissent, the faith of being very doubtful, the gospel of not bawling gospels, the wisdom of admitting the probable ignorance of one's self and of everybody else, and the energetic acceleration of a Movement for going very slow. ~ Ch 21”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. ~ Ch. 21”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He still had a fragment of his boyhood belief that congressmen were persons of intelligence and importance. ~ Ch. 22”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I must say I'm not very fond of oratory that's so full of energy it hasn't any room for facts. ~ Martin, Ch. 22”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is not known whether Martin ever completely accepted as a gentleman-scholar the Clay Tredgold who was devoted to everything about astronomy except studying it. ~ Ch. 22”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Men of measured merriment! Damn the great executives, the men of measured merriment, damn the men with careful smiles, damn the men that run the shops, oh, damn their measured merriment, the men with measured merriment, oh, damn their measured merriment, and DAMN their careful smiles! ~ Ch. 25”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 gif lectures for a living or even become, if you get to be plausible enough, a college president. So anyvay, it will be interesting. ~ Gottlieb, Ch. 26”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He is the only real revolutionary, the authentic scientist, because he alone knows how liddle he knows. He must be heartless. He lives in a cold, clear light. Yet dis is a funny t'ing: really, in private, he is not cold nor heartless—so much less cold than the Professional Optimists. ~ Gottlieb, Ch. 26”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. ~ Ch. 40”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Elmer Gantry was drunk. He was eloquently drunk, lovingly and pugnaciously drunk.”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He was born to be a senator. He never said anything important, and he always said it sonorously.”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He had, in fact, got everything from the church and Sunday School, except, perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason.”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Though Frank Shallard might have come to admire pictures, great music, civilized furniture, he had been trained to regard them as worldly, and to content himself with art which 'presented a message,' to regard 'Les Miserables' as superior because the bishop was a kind man, and 'The Scarlet Letter' as a poor book because the heroine was sinful and the author didn't mind.”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“His reasoning had been introverted, turned from an examination of men as mammals and devoted to a sorrow that sinful and aching souls should not more readily seek the security of a mystic process known as Conviction, Repentance, and Salvation, which he was assured by the noblest and most literate men he had ever known, was guaranteed to cure all woe. His own experience did not absolutely confirm this.”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even if some details of dogma aren't true—or even all of 'em—think what a consolation religion and the church are to weak humanity!" "Are they? I wonder! Don't cheerful agnostics, who know they are going to die dead, worry much less than good Baptists, who worry lest their sons and cousins and sweethearts fail to get into the Baptist heaven—or what is even worse, who wonder if they may not have guessed wrong—if God may not be a Catholic, maybe, or a Mormon or Seventh-day Adventist instead of a Baptist, and then they'll go to hell themselves. Consolation? No!”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was not her eloquence but her healing of the sick which raised Sharon to such eminence that she promised to become the most renowned evangelist in America. People were tired of eloquence; and the whole evangelist business was limited, since even the most ardent were not likely to be saved more than three of four times. But they could be healed constantly, and of the same disease.”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To one who had never made more than five thousand a year himself, it was inspiring to explain before dozens of popeyed and admiring morons how they could make ten thousand—fifty thousand—a million a year, and all this by the Wonder Power of Suggestion, by Aggressive Personality, by the Divine Rhythm, in fact by merely releasing the Inner Self-shine.”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What had he learned? Enough Hebrew and Greek to be able to crawl through the Bible by using lexicons—so that, like all his classmates once they were out of the seminary, he always read it in English. A good many of the more condemnatory texts of the Bible—rather less than the average Holy Roller carpenter-evangelist. The theory that India and Africa have woes because they are not Christianized, but that Christianized Bangor and Des Moines have woes because the devil, a being obviously more potent than omnipotent God, sneaks around counteracting the work of Baptist preachers.”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Maker of the universe with stars a hundred thousand light-years apart was interested, furious, and very personal about it if a small boy played baseball on Sunday afternoon.”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He explained that hatred was low. However, for the benefit of the more leathery and zealous deacons down front, he permitted them to hate all Catholics, all persons who failed to believe in hell and immersion, and all rich mortgage-holders, wantoning in the betraying smiles of scarlet women, each of whom wore silk and in her bejeweled hand held a ruby glass of perfidious wine.”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He was still not at all certain that he was doing any good, aside from providing the drug of religious hope to timorous folk frightened of hell-fire and afraid to walk alone.”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was brought up to believe that the Christian God wasn't a scared and compromising public servant, but the creator of the whole merciless truth, and I reckon that training spoiled me—I actually took my teachers seriously!”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A proper school should teach nothing but bookkeeping, agriculture, geometry, dead languages made deader by leaving out all the amusing literature, and the Hebrew Bible as interpreted by men superbly trained to ignore contradictions, men technically called "Fundamentalists".”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn "reasonable" and become your enemies, one quarter are afraid to speak, and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed final quarter keep you alive.”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So debated Doremus, like some hundreds of thousands of other craftsmen, teachers, lawyers, what-not, in some dozens of countries under a dictatorship, who were aware enough to resent the tyranny, conscientious enough not to take its bribes cynically, yet not so abnormally courageous as to go willingly to exile or dungeon or chopping-block—particularly when they "had wives and families to support.”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He was an actor of genius. There was no more overwhelming actor on the stage, in the motion pictures, nor even in the pulpit. He would whirl arms, bang tables, glare from mad eyes, vomit Biblical wrath from a gaping mouth; but he would also coo like a nursing mother, beseech like an aching lover, and in between tricks would coldly and almost contemptuously jab his crowds with figures and facts—figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect.”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why are you so afraid of the word 'Fascism,' Doremus? Just a word—just a word! And might not be so bad, with all the lazy bums we got panhandling relief nowadays, and living on my income tax and yours—not so worse to have a real Strong Man, like Hitler or Mussolini—like Napoleon or Bismarck in the good old days—and have 'em really run the country and make it efficient and prosperous again. 'Nother words, have a doctor who won't take any back-chat, but really boss the patient and make him get well whether he likes it or not!”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No one abhors violence more than I do. Still, you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs—" "Hell and damnation!" "Why, Pater!" "Don't call me 'Pater'! If I ever hear that 'can't make an omelet' phrase again, I'll start doing a little murder myself! It's used to justify every atrocity under every despotism, Fascist or Nazi or Communist or American labor war. Omelet! Eggs! By God, sir, men's souls and blood are not eggshells for tyrants to break!”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Aaron was uncomfortable and a little afraid. This, he thought, is how God might pray to his God. ~ Ch. 1”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Reverend Lucius Fairlow... a mild-spoken young-old man with mild chestnut hair and a mild chestnut mustache and a conservative theology which stuck mildly to the pleasant certainties of God's anger and eternal hellfire. ~ Ch. 2”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Aaron had learned… from Mr. Fairlow's two-hour sermons on "The Jealousy of an Angry Jehovah Who Hath Weighed Sinners in the Balance and Found Them Wanting",... that God was a torturer who punished small boys for sins they might commit later. ~ Ch. 3”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Good sense from a child was not necessarily contemptible beside foolishness from a grown-up. ~ Ch. 3”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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! ~ Ch. 3”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It might be the doing of Satan, in whom Aaron anxiously believed with all of his being except, perhaps, his mind. ~ Ch. 4”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was of no use. That particular sort of coward and evader he was not, and he lay abed facing all his sins, all his slacknesses, and the merited punishment by a just and angry God. ~ Ch. 5”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Deacon Uriel Gadd was a man of integrity, granite-rough and lichen-coated. The punishment in his rheumatism, clearly sent of God, and the defection of his son Elijah, had weakened him only in making him somewhat less contemptuous of his sentimental son Aaron. All other persons he divided into fools, scoundrels and the blessedly elect, with only himself indisputably in the last class. ~ Ch. 6”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hours then of blasphemy and fury and debate, all in the theological terms that seem shocking to the literate citizens today, who believe in God but just don't care to mention him or any of the other lowly friends they knew before they went to Yale. ~ Ch. 6”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everything seemed confused and contradictory, and he longed for one clear command from a divine martinet. ~ Ch. 7”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Maybe he was not a good-enough Christian to get the proper zest out of mortifying his indolent flesh. ~ Ch. 15”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now we got a lawyer, we got civilization, which I understand to mean that a man has a chance to get rich without working. ~ Ch. 17”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The more the Dakota have to do with the white, the worse. The whites give him whiskey to get his furs and bimeby he don't want to trap so many furst but he want plenty more whiskey. The white traders take his girl, and all he get in swap is a disease. They take his land, and all he get is a leetle annuity so he don't do any work and starve slow. The Indian gets white man's gun an he is drunk and kill his own brother and they call him sinful. That's what he get from the white man—fine kettle, fine gun, fine blanket, the big pox, the small pox and religion. ~ Ch. 20”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. ~ Ch. 21”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As they talked around the fire in the sitting-room, he was embarrassed by the nakedness of their piety. ~ Ch. 22”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When he gets uppity about his supposed learning, I just take it on myself to remind him that God and his angels know almost as much as college professors ~ Ch. 23”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He prayed, 'Lord God, let us be the kind of Christians that you would be if you were a Christian'. ~ Ch. 24”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source