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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.

Sinclair Lewis

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Sinclair Lewis
Journalist
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Sauk Centre
Minnesota
Harry Sinclair Lewis
National
Decline
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Protest
Pulitzer
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Declined
Art
Prize
Sterile
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Must
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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.
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It is, I think, an error to believe that there is any need of religion to make life seem worth living.
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Curiously, neither God nor the devil may wear modern dress, but must retain Grecian vestments.
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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.
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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.
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Life is hard and astonishingly complicated.... No one great reform will make it easy. Most of us who work -- or want to work -- will always have trouble or discontent. So we must learn to be calm, and train all our faculties, and make others happy.
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What is Love? Listen! It is the rainbow that stands out, in all its glorious many-colored hues, illuminating and making glad again the dark clouds of life. It is the morning and the evening star, that in glad refulgence, there on the awed horizon, call Nature's hearts to an uplifted rejoicing in God's marvelous firmament!
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Think how much better it is to criticize conventional customs if you yourself live up to them, scrupulously.
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It isn't what you earn but how spend it that fixes your class.
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When fascism comes to the United States it will be wrapped in the American flag and will claim the name of 100-percent Americanism
Sinclair Lewis
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He loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons.
Sinclair Lewis
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What are these unheard of sins you condemn so much - and like so well?
Sinclair Lewis
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If travel were so inspiring and informing a business ... then the wisest men in the world would be deck hands on tramp steamers.
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We'd get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all.
Sinclair Lewis
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His name was George F. Babbitt, and . . . he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.
Sinclair Lewis
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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.
Sinclair Lewis
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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.
Sinclair Lewis
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People will buy anything that is one to a customer.
Sinclair Lewis
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In everything was the spirit of children's play - not the rule-ridden, time-killing play of adults that is a preparation for death, but the busy and credulous play of children that is a preparation for life.
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Winter is not a season, it's an occupation.
Sinclair Lewis