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My one ambition is to get all Americans to realize that they are, and must continue to be, the greatest Race on the face of this old Earth, and second, to realize that whatever apparent Differences there may be among us, in wealth, knowledge, skill, ancestry or strength--though, of course, all this does not apply to people who are racially different from us--we are all brothers, bound together in the great and wonderful bond of National Uni..
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Sinclair Lewis |
6e7b3a5
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a huddle of robot sheep bleating their terror with mechanical lungs of a hundred horsepower.
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Sinclair Lewis |
c646c53
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We don't want all this highbrow intellectuality, all this book-learning. That's good enough in its way, but isn't it, after all, just a nice toy for grownups?
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Sinclair Lewis |
d0e9eab
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Except, perhaps, that he was an atheist in theology, he was a strict orthodox Christian.
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Sinclair Lewis |
9d9c7fa
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Is it just possible,' he sighed, 'that the most vigorous and obldest idealists have been the worst enemies of human progress instead of its greatest creators?
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political-science
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Sinclair Lewis |
094bd3c
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Is it just possible,' he sighed, 'that the most vigorous and boldest idealists have been the worst enemies of human progress instead of its greatest creators?
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Sinclair Lewis |
0399388
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He who had been a boy very credulous of life was no longer greatly interested in the possible and improbable adventures of each new day.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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All of them agreed that the working-classes must be kept in their place; and all of them perceived that American Democracy did not imply any equality of wealth, but did demand a wholesome sameness of thought, dress, painting, morals, and vocabulary.
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Sinclair Lewis |
b6da27a
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Gosh all fishhooks!" Ted wailed to Eunice, as they wolfed hot chocolate, lumps of nougat, and an assortment of glace nuts, in the mosaic splendor of the Royal Drug Store, "it gets me why Dad doesn't just pass out from being so poky."
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Sinclair Lewis |
9dd0a1c
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I don't mean to say we're perfect. We've got a lot to do in the way of extending the paving of motor boulevards, for, believe me, it's the fellow with four to ten thousand a year, say, and an automobile and a nice little family in a bungalow on the edge of town, that makes the wheels of progress go round!
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Sinclair Lewis |
28a16da
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To George F. Babbitt, as to most prosperous citizens of Zenith, his motor car was poetry and tragedy, love and heroism. The office was his pirate ship but the car his perilous excursion ashore.
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Sinclair Lewis |
88a1cdc
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Is it just possible," he sighed, "that the most vigorous and boldest idealists have been the worst enemies of human progress instead of its greatest creators? Possible that plain men with the humble trait of minding their own business will rank higher in the heavenly hierarchy than all the plumed souls who have shoved their way in among the masses and insisted on saving them?"
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Sinclair Lewis |
5b6a3b8
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Cim driv si clovek uvedomi, ze se s nim nikdo nebude mazlit a ze nemuze cekat, aby ho nekdo krmil zadarmo a tak, nebo ze jeho parchantum nekdo poskytne bezplatne vzdelani a co vsechno, dokud si na to nevydela, rozumis, tim driv se vrhne do prace a bude vyrabet - vyrabet - vyrabet. To Amerika potrebuje, a ne ty vase pohadecky, ktere v delnikovi jenom oslabuji silu vule a sugeruji jeho parchantum vselijake myslenky, ktere delne tride neprislu..
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Sinclair Lewis |
a511e06
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Elmer Gantry was drunk. He was eloquently drunk, lovingly and pugnaciously drunk.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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who shall in any way, publicly or privately, in print, writing, or by the spoken word, adversely criticize military training at or by Isaiah College, or in any other institution of learning in the United States, or by the state militias, federal forces, or other officially recognized military organizations in this country, shall be liable to immediate dismissal from this college, and any student who shall, with full and proper proof, bring ..
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Sinclair Lewis |
d78e74f
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Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn "reasonable" and become your enemies, one quarter are afraid to stop and speak and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed final quarter keep you alive."
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Sinclair Lewis |
9afd4d0
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cigar, and walked up and down before the house, a portly,
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Sinclair Lewis |
53a967a
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Jessup was a littlish man, skinny, smiling, well tanned, with a small gray mustache, a small and well-trimmed gray beard--in a community where to sport a beard was to confess one's self a farmer, a Civil War veteran, or a Seventh Day Adventist. Doremus's detractors said that he maintained the beard just to be "highbrow" and "different," to try to appear "artistic." Possibly they were right."
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Sinclair Lewis |
08af098
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It was a downy town, a drowsy town, a town of security and tradition, which still believed in Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, Memorial Day, and to which May Day was not an occasion for labor parades but for distributing small baskets of flowers.
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Sinclair Lewis |
1154370
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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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All credit to the men who invented paint and canvas, but there's more credit, eh? to the Raphaels and Holbeins who used those discoveries! Laennec and Osler, those are the men! It's all very fine, this business of pure research: seeking the truth, unhampered by commercialism or fame-chasing. Getting to the bottom. Ignoring consequences and practical uses. But do you realize if you carry that idea far enough, a man could justify himself for ..
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Sinclair Lewis |
f2d2a40
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What nasty men! I do hope they get shot soon," which for Mrs. Candy was a startlingly long and humanitarian statement." --
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Sinclair Lewis |
d622c45
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7 per cent of all the families in the country earned $500 a year or less--remember, those weren't the unemployed, on relief; those were the guys that had the honor of still doing honest labor.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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Why, Windrip's just something nasty that's been vomited up. Plenty others still left fermenting in the stomach--quack economists with every sort of economic ptomaine! No, Buzz isn't important--it's the sickness that made us throw him up that we've got to attend to--the sickness of more than 30 per cent permanently unemployed, and growing larger. Got to cure it!
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Sinclair Lewis |
52bff28
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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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But he saw now that he must remain alone, a "Liberal," scorned by all the noisier prophets for refusing to be a willing cat for the busy monkeys of either side. But at worst, the Liberals, the Tolerant, might in the long run preserve some of the arts of civilization, no matter which brand of tyranny should finally dominate the world."
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epiphany
liberalism
tolerance
tyranny
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Sinclair Lewis |
68cf558
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For more than a year now, the League of Forgotten Men has warned the politicians, the whole government, that we are sick unto death of being the Dispossessed--and that, at last, we are more than fifty million strong; no whimpering horde, but with the will, the voices, the votes to enforce our sovereignty!
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Sinclair Lewis |
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Do you suppose it's dangerous?" she asked her father, who said a lot of comforting things that didn't mean anything."
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Sinclair Lewis |
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that both the control of credit and the power to issue money be unqualifiedly taken away from the private banks; that the soldiers not only receive the bonus they with their blood and anguish so richly earned in '17 and '18, but that the amount agreed upon be now doubled; that all swollen incomes be severely limited and inheritances cut to such small sums as may support the heirs only in youth and in old age;
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Sinclair Lewis |
37d44b4
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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. But he saw too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word "Fascism" and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty. For they were thieves no..
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communism
facism
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Sinclair Lewis |
c65afdb
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not as perfect, but as the most probable saviors of the country from, on one hand, domination by Moscow and, on the other hand, the slack indolence, the lack of decent pride of half the American youth, whose world (these idealists asserted) was composed of shiftless distaste for work and refusal to learn anything thoroughly, of blatting dance music on the radio, maniac automobiles, slobbering sexuality, the humor and art of comic strips--of..
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Sinclair Lewis |
583b49d
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For even with an army of slaves, it was necessary to persuade them that they were freemen and fighters for the principle of freedom, or otherwise the scoundrels might cross over and join the enemy!
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Sinclair Lewis |
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I tell you, an honest man gets sick when he hears the word 'Liberty' today, after what the Republicans did to it!
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Sinclair Lewis |
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For they were thieves not only of wages but of honor. To their purpose they could quote not only Scripture but Jefferson.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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An honest propagandist for any Cause, that is, one who honestly studies and figures out the most effective way of putting over his Message, will learn fairly early that it is not fair to ordinary folks--it just confuses them--to try to make them swallow all the true facts that would be suitable to a higher class of people. And one seemingly small but almighty important point he learns, if he does much speechifying, is that you can win over ..
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Sinclair Lewis |
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God, sir, men's souls and blood are not eggshells for tyrants to break!
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Sinclair Lewis |
7018979
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Manhattan peasants. Kind people, industrious people, generous to their aged, eager to find any desperate cure for the sickness of worry over losing the job. Most facile material for any rabble-rouser.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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American whose fathers have lived in the country for over two generations is so utterly different from any other American.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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Now listen, Dad. You don't understand Senator Windrip. Oh, he's something of a demagogue--he shoots off his mouth a lot about how he'll jack up the income tax and grab the banks, but he won't--that's just molasses for the cockroaches. What he will do, and maybe only he can do it, is to protect us from the murdering, thieving, lying Bolsheviks that would--why, they'd like to stick all of us that are going on this picnic, all the decent clean..
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Sinclair Lewis |
63bf18c
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Women, she pointed out, had done nothing with the vote. If the United States had only listened to her back in 1919 she could have saved them all this trouble. No. Certainly not. No votes.
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votes
voting
women
women-s-suffrage
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Sinclair Lewis |
d6ab5de
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Democracy--here and in Britain and France, it hasn't been so universal a sniveling slavery as Naziism in Germany, such an imagination-hating, pharisaic materialism as Russia--even if it has produced industrialists like you, Frank, and bankers like you, R. C., and given you altogether too much power and money. On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy's given the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had.
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democracy
dignity
germany
money
power
russia
united-states
workers
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Sinclair Lewis |
35c7689
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Wait till Buzz takes charge of us. A real Fascist dictatorship!" "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 ove..
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democracy
dictatorships
fascism
hysterics
united-states-of-america
us
usa
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Sinclair Lewis |
e681df9
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It was Father Charles Coughlin, of Detroit, who had first thought out the device of freeing himself from any censorship of his political sermons on the Mount by "buying his own time on the air"-- it being only in the twentieth century that mankind has been able to buy Time as it buys soap and gasoline. This invention was almost equal, in its effect on all American life and thought, to Henry Ford's early conception of selling cars cheap to m..
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capitalism
censorship
henry-ford
radio
time
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Sinclair Lewis |
f4ac083
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The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his "ideas" almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a"
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Sinclair Lewis |