Sinclair Lewis
It has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditation upon the fact that he is better off than others.Collection: Meditation
The world and all its wisdom is but a booby, blundering school-boy that needs management and could be managed, if men and women would be human beings instead of just business men, or plumbers, or army officers, or commuters, or educators, or authors, or clubwomen, or traveling salesmen, or Socialists, or Republicans, or Salvation Army leaders, or wearers of cloths.Collection: School
There are two insults which no human being will endure: The assertion that he hasn't a sense of humor, and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.Collection: Two
On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy has given the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had.Collection: Democracies Have
Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement of ignorance which is so easy to come by. To be 'intellectual' or 'artistic' or, in their own word, to be 'highbrow,' is to be priggish and of dubious virtue.Collection: Ignorance
You," Said Dr. Yavitch, "are a middle-road liberal, and you haven't the slightest idea what you want. I, being a revolutionist, know exactly what I want -- and what I want now is a drink.Collection: Ideas
Good Lord, I don't know what 'rights' a man has! And I don't know the solution of boredom. If I did, I'd be the one philosopher that had the cure for living. But I do know that about ten times as many people find their lives dull, and unnecessarily dull, as ever admit it; and I do believe that if we busted out and admitted it sometimes, instead of being nice and patient and loyal for sixty years, and then nice and patient and dead for the rest of eternity, why, maybe, possibly, we might make life more fun.Collection: Fun
Indians, of course, have no "theology," and indeed no word for the system of credulity in which the white priests arrange for God, who must be entirely bewildered by it, a series of excuses for his failures.Collection: White
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.Collection: Running
She did her work with the thoroughness of a mind which reveres details and never quite understands them.Collection: Mind
Writers kid themselves-about themselves and other people. Take the talk about writing methods. Writing is just work-there's no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type with your toes-it is just work.Collection: Writing
If travel were so inspiring and informing a business ... then the wisest men in the world would be deck hands on tramp steamers.Collection: Men
In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.Collection: Country
Upon this theology he rarely pondered. The kernel of his practical religion was that it was respectable, and beneficial to one's business, to be seen going to services; that the church kept the Worst Elements from being still worse; and that the pastor's sermons, however dull they might seem at the time of taking, yet had a voodooistic power which 'did a fellow good-- kept him in touch with Higher Things.Collection: Past
We'd get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all.Collection: Sick
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!Collection: Thinking
Being a man given to oratory and high principles, he enjoyed the sound of his own vocabulary and the warmth of his own virtue.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Blue
She was snatched back from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main Street.Collection: Dream
Fortune has dealt with me rather too well. I have known little struggle, not much poverty, many generosities. Now and then I have, for my books or myself, been somewhat warmly denounced -- there was one good pastor in California who upon reading my Elmer Gantry desired to lead a mob and lynch me, while another holy man in the state of Maine wondered if there was no respectable and righteous way of putting me in jail.Collection: Reading
I have faith in Faith, I have reverence for all true Reverence.Collection: Have Faith
Vast is the power of cities to reclaim the wanderer.Collection: Cities
Writing is just work-there's no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type or write with your toes-it's still just work.Collection: Writing
A village in a country which is taking pains to become altogether standardized and pure, which aspires to succeed Victorian England as the chief mediocrity of the world, is no longer merely provincial, no longer downy and restful in its leaf-shadowed ignorance. It is a force seeking to conquer the earth. Sure of itself, it bullies other civilizations, as a traveling salesman in a brown derby conquers the wisdom of China and tacks advertisements of cigarettes over arches for centuries dedicated to the sayings of Confucius.Collection: Country
Paris is one of the largest, and certainly it is the pleasantest, of modern American cities.Collection: Cities
You've been telling us about how to secure peace, but come on, now, General-just among us Rotarians and Rotary Anns-'fess up! With your great experience, don't you honest, cross-your-heart, think that perhaps-just maybe-when a country has gone money-mad, like all our labor unions and workmen, with their propaganda to hoist income taxes, so that the thrifty and industrious have to pay for the shiftless ne'er-do-weels, then maybe, to save their lazy souls and get some iron into them, a war might be a good thing? Come on, now, tell your real middle name, Mong General!Collection: Country
I can not understand why ministers presume to deliver sermons every week at appointed hours because it is humanly impossible for inspirations to come with clock-like regularityCollection: Inspiration
It might be the doing of Satan, in whom Aaron anxiously believed with all of his being except, perhaps, his mind.Collection: Mind
There are so many people in the world who are eager to do for you things that you do not wish done, provided only that you will do for them things that you don't wish to do.Collection: People
The one thing that can be more disconcerting than intelligent hatred is demanding love.Collection: Intelligent
So much in a revolution is nothing but waiting.Collection: Waiting
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!Collection: Christian
The cocktail filled him with a whirling exhilaration behind which he was aware of devastating desires—to rush places in fast motors, to kiss girls, to sing, to be witty. ... He perceived that he had gifts of profligacy which had been neglected. —chapter 8Collection: Girl
Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.Collection: Contentment
Don't be a writer. Writing is an escape from something. You be a scientist.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Art
The game (baseball)was a custom of his clan, and it gave outlet for the homicidal and sides-taking instincts which Babbitt called "patriotism" and "love of sport."Collection: Sports
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?Collection: Men
Fine, large, meaningless, general terms like romance and business can always be related. They take the place of thinking, and are highly useful to optimists and lecturers.Collection: Thinking
What are these unheard of sins you condemn so much - and like so well?Collection: Sin
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.Collection: Baseball
His name was George F. Babbitt, and . . . he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.Collection: Names
It is one of the major tragedies that nothing is more discomforting than the hearty affection of the Old Friends who never were friends.Collection: Old Friends
He loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons.Collection: People
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.Collection: Country
That nation is proudest and noblest and most exalted which has the greatest number of really great men.Collection: Men
There are dozens of young poets and fictioneers most of them a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce, who, however insane they may be, have refused to be genteel and traditional and dull.Collection: Insane
Unhappy women are given to protecting their sensitiveness by cynical gossip, by whining, by high-church and new-thought religions, or by a fog of vagueness.Collection: Fog
Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest; it is an industry.Collection: Winter