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ae8e794
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She laughed at herself when she saw that she had expected to be at once a heretic and a returned hero; she was very reasonable and merry about it; and it hurt just as much as ever.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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3f97188
|
government of the profits, by the profits, for the profits.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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8231beb
|
Like all males, he hated to confess ignorance by asking directions,
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Sinclair Lewis |
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a2dacfd
|
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 neighbors who know how to wear cheap clothes showily, and envy neighbors who can dance or make love or digest better.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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5830eef
|
The Reverend Elmer Gantry was reading an illustrated pink periodical devoted to prize fighters and chorus girls in his room at Elizabeth J. Schmutz Hall late of an afternoon when two large men walked in without knocking. "Why, good evening, Brother Bains--Brother Naylor! This is a pleasant surprise. I was, uh-- Did you ever see this horrible rag? About actoresses. An invention of the devil himself. I was thinking of denouncing it next Sunda..
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Sinclair Lewis |
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8d86507
|
Like every thoughtful parent in every age of history, Neil consoled himself, "My generation failed, but this new one is going to change the entire world, and go piously to the polls even on rainy election-days, and never drink more than one cocktail, and end all war." --
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generations
politics
social-good
society
voting
war
young-people
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Sinclair Lewis |
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76fcea3
|
Oh, quit it! You're the possessor of a beautiful wife, a beautiful gas-stove, and you were going to forget all this race-hysteria.
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race
society
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Sinclair Lewis |
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0dcd21a
|
The fact that none of these civic worriers had ever heard of such a case was unimportant, because they all had heard of somebody who had heard of it!
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rumors
society
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Sinclair Lewis |
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13dd2ca
|
Well, he'd get help from the Bible. It was all inspired, every word, no matter what scoffers like Jim said. He'd take the first text he turned to and talk on that. He opened on: 'Now THEREFORE, Tatnai, governor beyond the river, Shethar-boznai, and your companions the Apharsachites, which ARE beyond the river, be ye far from thence,' an injunction spirited but not at present helpful.
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sermon-writing
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Sinclair Lewis |
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c5587d2
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Going seventy miles an hour but not going anywhere--not enough imagination to want to go anywhere! Getting their music by turning a dial. Getting their phrases from the comic strips instead of from Shakespeare and the Bible and Veblen and Old Bill Sumner. Pap-fed flabs!
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Sinclair Lewis |
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36228fc
|
She could not escape asking (in the exact words and mental intonations which a thousand million women, dairy wenches and mischief-making queens, had used before her, and which a million million women will know hereafter), "Was it all a horrible mistake, my marrying him?" She quieted the doubt--without answering it."
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Sinclair Lewis |
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25bc280
|
It keeps strays in the flock. To word it differently: 'You must live up to the popular code if you believe in it; but if you don't believe in it, then you MUST live up to it!
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Sinclair Lewis |
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4ef0eb0
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The shame of emotion overpowered them; they cursed a little, to prove they were good rough fellows; and in a mellow silence, Babbitt whistling while Paul hummed, they paddled back to the hotel.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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d89c749
|
Lord, why can't the women let you alone? Just because once or twice, seven hundred million years ago, you were a poor fool, why can't they let you forget it?
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Sinclair Lewis |
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018ab73
|
HIS march to greatness was not without disastrous stumbling.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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34dffe5
|
It was not an esthetic room. Though Frank Shallard might have come to admire pictures, great music, civilized furniture, he had been trained to regard them as worldly, and to content himself with art which 'presented a message,' to regard 'Les Miserables' as superior because the bishop was a kind man, and 'The Scarlet Letter' as a poor book because the heroine was sinful and the author didn't mind.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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ae8f738
|
And when Elmer was about to slip out to the kitchen with her to make lemonade, Benham held him by demanding, 'What do you think of John Wesley's doctrine of perfection?' 'Oh, it's absolutely sound and proven,' admitted Elmer, wondering what the devil Mr. Wesley's doctrine of perfection might be.
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john-wesley
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Sinclair Lewis |
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68e4754
|
The Wonderlust--probably it's a worse affliction than the Wanderlust.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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04802ce
|
It is an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness, of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear respectable. It is contentment...the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is dullness made God. A savorless peop..
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Sinclair Lewis |
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60956d9
|
When Buzz gets in, he won't be having any parade of wounded soldiers. That'll be bad Fascist psychology. All those poor devils he'll hide away in institutions, and just bring out the lively young human slaughter cattle in uniforms.
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government
hypocrisy
war
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Sinclair Lewis |
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e50c363
|
In matrimonial geography the distance between the first mute recognition of a break and the admission thereof is as great as the distance between the first naive faith and the first doubting.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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42e3c19
|
The days of pioneering, of lassies in sunbonnets, and bears killed with axes in piney clearings, are deader now than Camelot; and a rebellious girl is the spirit of that bewildered empire called the American Middlewest.
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spirit-of-the-wesr
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Sinclair Lewis |
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9fe333d
|
All this working land was turned into exuberance by the light. The sunshine was dizzy on open stubble; shadows from immense cumulus clouds were forever sliding across low mounds; and the sky was wider and loftier and more resolutely blue than the sky of cities... she declared. "It's a glorious country; a land to be big in"
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Sinclair Lewis |
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3f58d24
|
People will think they're electing him to create more economic security. Then watch the Terror! God knows there's been enough indication that we can have tyranny in America-the fix of the southern share-croppers, the working conditions of the miners and garment-makers, and our keeping Mooney in prison so many years. But wait till Windrip shows us how to say it with machine guns!
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Sinclair Lewis |
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6be3efb
|
Cure the evils of Democracy by the evils of Fascism! Funny therapeutics.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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edceff6
|
I don't pretend to be a very educated man, except maybe educated in the heart, and in being able to feel for the sorrows and fears of every ornery fellow human being.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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6ae655c
|
He wanted to honor Shad for the sweaty shirt, the honest toil, and all the rugged virtues, but even as a Liberal American Humanitarian, Doremus found it hard always to keep up the Longfellow's-Village-Blacksmith-cum-Marx attitude consistently and not sometimes backslide into a belief that there must be crooks and swine among the toilers as, notoriously, there were so shockingly many among persons with more than $3500 a year.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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042cc7e
|
Believing that only under God Almighty, to Whom we render all homage, do we Americans hold our vast Power, we shall guarantee to all persons absolute freedom of religious worship, provided, however, that no atheist, agnostic, believer in Black Magic, nor any Jew who shall refuse to swear allegiance to the New Testament, nor any person of any faith who refuses to take the Pledge to the Flag, shall be permitted to hold any public office or to..
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Sinclair Lewis |
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db4a999
|
Nonsense! Nonsense!" snorted Tasbrough. "That couldn't happen here in America, not possibly! We're a country of freemen." "The answer to that," suggested Doremus Jessup, "if Mr. Falck will forgive me, is 'the hell it can't!' 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 Win..
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Sinclair Lewis |
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cf6d647
|
But plenty things like this happened before Buzz Windrip ever came in, Doremus," insisted John Pollikop... "You never thought about them, because they was just routine news, to stick in your paper. Things like the sharecroppers and the Scottsboro boys and the plots of the California wholesalers against the agricultural union and dictatorship in Cuba and the way phony deputies in Kentucky shot striking miners."
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Sinclair Lewis |
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1a0e8ef
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We go back to the Dark Ages! The crust of learning and good manners and tolerance is so thin! It would just take a few thousand big shells and gas bombs to wipe out all the eager young men, and all the libraries and historical archives and patent offices, all the laboratories and art galleries, all the castles and Periclean temples and Gothic cathedrals, all the cooperative stores and motor factories--every storehouse of learning. No inhe..
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culture
dark-ages
fragility
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Sinclair Lewis |
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3909331
|
She had become so dully habituated to married life that in her full matronliness she was as sexless as an anemic nun. She was a good woman, a kind woman, a diligent woman, but no one, save perhaps Tinka her ten-year-old, was at all interested in her or entirely aware that she was alive.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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c125069
|
He was permitted, without restriction, to speak of himself as immoral, agnostic and socialistic, so long as it was universally known that he remained pure, Presbyterian, and Republican.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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65ec7a0
|
We don't want all this highbrow intellectuality, all this book-learning.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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4f9f21a
|
As to industrial conditions, however, Babbitt had thought a great deal, and his opinions may be coordinated as follows: "A good labor union is of value because it keeps out radical unions, which would destroy property. No one ought to be forced to belong to a union, however. All labor agitators who try to force men to join a union should be hanged. In fact, just between ourselves, there oughtn't to be any unions allowed at all; and as it's ..
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Sinclair Lewis |
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fc1c924
|
So much of a revolution for so many people is nothing but waiting. That is one reason why tourists rarely see anything but contentment in a crushed population.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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e2a43d1
|
In my opinion, what the country needs, first and foremost, is a good, sound, business-like conduct of its affairs. What we need is--a business administration !
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politics-of-the-united-states
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Sinclair Lewis |
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c08e3bf
|
More and more, as I think about history," he pondered, "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. But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and of silencing them forever." *"
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Sinclair Lewis |
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1bdc6e2
|
He called himself an "agnostic" instead of an "atheist" only because he detested the street-bawling, tract-peddling evangelicism of the professional atheists."
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Sinclair Lewis |
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7aaf958
|
preachers and modernist educators and discontented newspapermen and farm agitators--maybe they'll worry at first, but they'll get caught up in the web of propaganda, like we all were in the Great War, 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 meanwhil..
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Sinclair Lewis |
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8afe31f
|
world." "I love her for being so happy," Carol brooded. "I ought to be that way. I worship the baby, but the housework----Oh, I suppose I'm fortunate; so much better off than farm-women on a new clearing, or people in a slum." It"
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Sinclair Lewis |
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83b2a13
|
Just as he was an Elk, a Booster, and a member of the Chamber of Commerce, just as the priests of the Presbyterian Church determined his every religious belief and the senators who controlled the Republican Party decided in little smoky rooms in Washington what he should think about disarmament, tariff, and Germany, so did the large national advertisers fix the surface of his life, fix what he believed to be his individuality.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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248a914
|
Albert Einstein, who had been exiled from Germany for his guilty devotion to mathematics, world peace, and the violin, was now exiled from America for the same crimes.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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0157005
|
He stopped smoking at least once a month. He went through with it like the solid citizen he was: admitted the evils of tobacco, courageously made resolves, laid out plans to check the vice, tapered off his allowance of cigars, and expounded the pleasures of virtuousness to every one he met. He did everything, in fact, except stop smoking.
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Sinclair Lewis |