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ea2bdba
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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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masculinity
sports
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Sinclair Lewis |
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2dfc2e5
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and they'll all be convinced that, even if our Buzzy maybe has got a few faults, he's on the side of the plain people, and against all the tight old political machines, and they'll rouse the country for him as the Great Liberator (and meanwhile Big Business will just wink and sit tight!) and then, by God, this crook--oh, I don't know whether he's more of a crook or an hysterical religious fanatic--along with Sarason and Haik and Prang and M..
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Sinclair Lewis |
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9806fa2
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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!
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Sinclair Lewis |
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a970c2b
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They decided now, talking it over in their tight little two-and-quarter room flat, that most people who call themselves 'truth seekers' - persons who scurry about chattering of Truth as though it were a tangible seperable thing, like houses or salt or bread - did not so much desire to find Truth as to cure their mental itch. In novels, these truth-seekers quested the 'secret of life' in laboratories which did not seem to be provided wtih Bu..
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Sinclair Lewis |
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dca08c5
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It's one of our favorite American myths that broad plains necessarily make broad minds, and high mountains make high purpose.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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99d3a1c
|
For many minutes, for many hours, for a bleak eternity, he lay awake, shivering, reduced to primitive terror, comprehending that he had won freedom, and wondering what he could do with anything so unknown and so embarrassing as freedom.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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96b7dfd
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Never was a Family more insistent on learning one another's movements than were the Bunch. All of them volubly knew, or indignantly desired to know, where all the others had been every minute of the week.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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67c962e
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If a queen comes to America, crowds fill the station squares, and attendant British journalists rejoice, 'You see: the American Cousins are as respectful to Royalty as we are.' But the Americans have read of queens since babyhood. they want to see one queen, once, and if another came to town next week, with twice as handsome a crown, she would not draw more than two small boys and an Anglophile. Americans want to see one movie star, one gir..
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novelty
royalty
satire
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Sinclair Lewis |
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97e7d46
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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..
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warfare
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Sinclair Lewis |
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250ab36
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Vast is the power of cities to reclaim the wanderer.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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7fda970
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To the connoisseur of scenes, nothing is more enjoyable than a thorough, melodramatic, egoistic humility.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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6d19efc
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She bought a budget-plan account book and made her budgets as exact as budgets are likely to be when they lack budgets.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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1cea2db
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He was in stature but a small man, yet remember that so were Napoleon, Lord Beaverbrook, Stephen A. Douglas, Frederick the Great, and the Dr. Goebbels who is privily known throughout Germany as "Wotan's Mickey Mouse."
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fascism
liberal
plutocracy
politics
right-wing-politics
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Sinclair Lewis |
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5328b88
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Call me a socialist or any blame thing you want to, as long as you grab hold of the other end of the cross-cut saw with me and help slash the big logs of Poverty and Intolerance to pieces.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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c7b504a
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Which of them said which has never been determined, and does not matter, since they all had the same ideas and expressed them always with the same ponderance and brassy assurance. If it was not Babbitt who was delivering any given verdict, at least he was beaming on the chancellor who did deliver it. (p. 116)
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Sinclair Lewis |
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a30f5a9
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There is no Solution! There will never be a state of society anything like perfect!
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Sinclair Lewis |
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9765a31
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and after saying good-by to him at the station, Babbitt returned to his office to realize that he faced a world which, without Paul, was meaningless.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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a322205
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Said Doremus, "Hm. Yes, I agree it's a serious time. With all the discontent there is in the country to wash him into office, Senator Windrip has got an excellent chance to be elected President, next November, and if he is, probably his gang of buzzards will get us into some war, just to grease their insane vanity and show the world that we're the huskiest nation going. And then I, the Liberal and you, the Plutocrat, the bogus Tory, will be..
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Sinclair Lewis |
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368c41c
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She found beauty in the children.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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d8077e7
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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 Thr..
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Sinclair Lewis |
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6f490c7
|
Your lips are for songs about rivers in the morning and lakes at twilight.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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aea206e
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Those of you who have listened to me before will understand that I--or rather that the League of Forgotten Men--has no quarrel with individual Jews; that we are proud to have Rabbis among our directors; but those subversive international organizations which, unfortunately, are so largely Jewish, must be driven with whips and scorpions from off the face of the earth.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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24dd13b
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He had every prejudice and aspiration of every American Common Man. He believed in the desirability and therefore the sanctity of thick buckwheat cakes with adulterated maple syrup, in rubber trays for the ice cubes in his electric refrigerator, in the especial nobility of dogs, all dogs, in the oracles of S. Parkes Cadman, in being chummy with all waitresses at all junction lunch rooms, and in Henry Ford (when he became President, he exult..
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Sinclair Lewis |
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bd8cf7f
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He had learned how to assemble Jewish texts, Greek philosophy, and Middle-Western evangelistic anecdotes into a sermon. And he had learned that poverty was blessed, but that bankers make the best deacons.
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sermons
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Sinclair Lewis |
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9a2846e
|
She was close in her husband's arms; she clung to him; whatever of strangeness and slowness and insularity she might find in him, none of that mattered so long as she could slip her hands beneath his coat, run her fingers over the warm smoothness of the satin back of his waistcoat, seem almost to creep into his body, find in him strength, find in the courage and kindness of her man a shelter from the perplexing world.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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a0666ce
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I can never forgive evil and lying and cruel means, and still less can I forgive fanatics that use that for an excuse!
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Sinclair Lewis |
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526c8e2
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all of the good-intentioners who wanted to 'do something for the common people' were insignificant, because the 'common people' were able to do things for themselves, and highly likely to, as soon as they learned the fact.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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85f89b1
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My dear man, there's nothing I'd like better than to be by myself occasionally... I suppose you expect me to sit here and dream delicately and satisfy my tempermentality while you wander in from the bathroom with lather all over your face and shout "seen my brown pants?"
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Sinclair Lewis |
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ac682e4
|
Whatever she might become she would never be static.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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a57abde
|
America, like England and Scotland, had never really been a gay nation. Rather it had been heavily and noisily jocular, with a substratum of worry and insecurity, in the image of its patron saint, Lincoln of the rollicking stories and the tragic heart.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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1165144
|
Life is comfortable and clean enough here already. And so secure. What it needs it to be less secure, more eager.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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98e770a
|
And though he had almost flunked in Greek, his thesis on 'Sixteen Ways of Paying a Church Debt' had won the ten-dollar prize in Practical Theology.
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theology
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Sinclair Lewis |
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25da2c3
|
More and more, as I think about history, I am convinced that everything that is worth while in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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5bf8780
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In a matter of weeks, he had learned that without suffering and doubt, there can be no whole human being.
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doubt
humanity
maturity
suffering
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Sinclair Lewis |
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280d273
|
Summarized, the letter explained that he was all against the banks but all for the bankers-except the Jewish bankers who were to be driven out of finance entirely; that he had thoroughly tested (but unspecified) plans to make all wages very high and the prices of everything produced by these same highly paid workers very low; that he was 100 per cent for Labor, but 100 per cent against all strikes; and that he was in favor of the United Sta..
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Sinclair Lewis |
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322435d
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Once, modestly enough, Doremus had assumed that he had a decent knowledge of finance, taxation, the gold standard, agricultural exports, and he had smilingly pontificated everywhere that Liberal Capitalism would pastorally lead into State Socialism, with governmental ownership of mines and railroads and water-power so settling all inequalities of income that every lion of a structural steel worker would be willing to lie down with any lamb ..
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Sinclair Lewis |
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3e13c0a
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Why, there's no country in the world that can get more hysterical--yes, or more obsequious!--than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns his State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio--divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many o..
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Sinclair Lewis |
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66753fe
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The Executive has got to have a freer hand and be able to move quick in an emergency, and not be tied down by a lot of dumb shyster-lawyer congressmen taking months to shoot off their mouths in debates.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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271b5fb
|
Well, gentlemen, I have listened to all your Solutions, and I now inform you that I, and I alone, except perhaps for Walt Trowbridge and the ghost of Pareto, have the perfect, the inevitable, the only Solution, and that is: There is no Solution! There will never be a state of society anything like perfect! "There never will be a time when there won't be a large proportion of people who feel poor no matter how much they have, and envy their ..
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envy
perfection
politics
poverty
society
solutions
utopia
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Sinclair Lewis |
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4431b0a
|
Not individuals but institutions are the enemies, and they most afflict the disciples who the most generously serve them. They insinuate their tyranny under a hundred guises and pompous names, such as Polite Society, the Family, the Church, Sound Business, the Party, the Country, the Superior White Race; and the only defense against them, Carol beheld, was unembittered laughter.
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institutions
laughter
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Sinclair Lewis |
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dcba8a1
|
He was afraid that the world struggle today was not of Communism against Fascism, but of tolerance against the bigotry that was preached equally by Communism and Fascism.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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054f14a
|
Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on. *
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Sinclair Lewis |
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0a06030
|
Reek took not more than an hour to relate what would've taken the most intelligent man five or six hours--that is, five minutes of speech and the rest of the five hours to recover from the nausea caused by having to utter such shameless rot...
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Sinclair Lewis |
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a8e210b
|
She did not yet know the immense ability of the world to be casually cruel and proudly dull,
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Sinclair Lewis |