Sinclair Lewis

Damn the great executives, the men of measured merriment, damn the men with careful smiles oh, damn their measured merriment.

When facism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.

Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.

The grateful savants had accepted, and they were spending the rest of their lives reading fifteenth-hand opinions, taking pleasant naps, and drooling out to yawning students the anemic and wordy bookishness which they called learning.

Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn "reasonable" and become your enemies, one quarter are afraid to speak, and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed are the final quarter keep you alive.

He fretted that he did not know anything. He sighed, 'I have sought the Kingdom of God a little, the Squire has sought it terribly, but we haven't even a map, and after what I saw this afternoon, I know the Sioux are as barbarous as we are. Is it possible that nobody has ever known— that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won't be for another thousand years?