SINCLAIR LEWIS

Pugnacity is a form of courage, but a very bad form.

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.

What is love? It is the morning and the evening star.

Damn the great executives, the men of measured merriment, damn the men with careful smiles oh, damn their measured merriment.

There are two insults no human being will endure: that he has no sense of humor, and that he has never known trouble.

He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all.

Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.

Winter is not a season, it's an occupation.

Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.

When audiences come to see us authors lecture, it is largely in the hope that we'll be funnier to look at than to read.

Whatever poet, orator or sage may say of it, old age is still old age.

People will buy anything that is 'one to a customer.'

The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.

On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy has given the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had.

When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the American flag and carrying a cross.

Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know America is better than every other country.

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

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.

He was born to be a senator. He never said anything important, and he always said it sonorously.

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 are the final quarter keep you alive.

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 business man.

Babbitt spoke well--and often--at these orgies of commercial righteousness about the "realtor's function as a seer of the future development of the community, and as a prophetic engineer clearing the pathway for inevitable changes"--which meant that a real-estate broker could make money by guessing which way the town would grow. This guessing he called Vision.

Cure the evils of Democracy by the evils of Fascism! Funny therapeutics! I've heard of their curing syphilis by giving the patient malaria, but I've never heard of their curing malaria by giving the patient syphilis.

Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest; it is an industry.

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.