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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
Must
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Every
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Writers
Polite
National
Decline
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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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Men die, but the plutocracy is immortal and it is necessary that fresh generations should be trained to its service.
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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.
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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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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.
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Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.
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There was much conversation, most of which sounded like the rest of it.
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People will buy anything that is one to a customer.
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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.
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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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Pugnacity is a form of courage, but a very bad form.
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Fascism will come to America wrapped in a flag.
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What are these unheard of sins you condemn so much - and like so well?
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Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
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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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NOW is a fact that cannot be dodged.
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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.
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Since dictating the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to explain it, God has never done much but creep around and try to catch us disobeying it.
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Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.
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When facism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the American flag.
Sinclair Lewis