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Sinclair Lewis citations
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Harry Sinclair Lewis est un romancier et dramaturge américain majeur des années 1920 et 1930. Ses romans sont à la fois des chroniques naturalistes de la société américaine moderne, de ses « petites villes » , de sa classe moyenne aisée, et une peinture satirique de sa monotonie, de sa vulgarité affairiste et consumériste, de sa bigoterie et de son hypocrisie. Les caricatures dévastatrices de Lewis, bien que compréhensives, ont suscité de violentes polémiques.

En 1930, il fut le premier Américain à recevoir le prix Nobel de littérature. Ce prix récompense tout particulièrement Babbitt , l’un de ses romans les plus connus, dont le nom est devenu un mot du langage courant. Wikipedia  

✵ 7. février 1885 – 10. janvier 1951   •   Autres noms ਸਿਨਕਲੇਅਰ ਲੁਈਸ, Lyuis Garri Sinkler
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Sinclair Lewis: 136   citations 0   J'aime

Sinclair Lewis: Citations en anglais

“There are two insults which no human being will endure: The assertion that he hasn't a sense of humor, and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.”

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Sinclair Lewis livre Main Street

Main Street (1920)

“It is one of the major tragedies that nothing is more discomforting than the hearty affection of the Old Friends who never were friends.”

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Sinclair Lewis livre Arrowsmith

Source: Arrowsmith (1925), Ch. 20

“You're so earnest about morality that I hate to think how essentially immoral you must be underneath.”

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Sinclair Lewis livre Babbitt

Source: Babbitt

“Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.”

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Sinclair Lewis livre Babbitt

Source: Babbitt

“Most troubles are unnecessary. We have Nature beaten; we can make her grow wheat; we can keep warm when she sends blizzards. So we raise the devil just for pleasure--wars, politics, race-hatreds, labor-disputes.”

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Sinclair Lewis livre Main Street

Source: Main Street

“There had to be one man in town independent enough to sass the banker!”

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Sinclair Lewis livre Main Street

Main Street (1920)

“He was worried lest during his late discontent he had imperiled his salvation. He was not quite sure there was a Heaven to be attained, but Dr. John Jennison said there was, and Babbitt was not going to take a chance.”

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Sinclair Lewis livre Babbitt

Babbitt (1922), Ch. 34

“The greatest mystery about a human being is not his reaction to sex or praise, but the manner in which he contrives to put in twenty-four hours a day. It is this which puzzles the longshoreman about the clerk, the Londoner about the bushman.”

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Sinclair Lewis livre Main Street

Main Street (1920)

“They were newly rich contractors who, having bought houses, motors, hand-painted pictures, and gentlemanliness, were now buying a refined ready-made philosophy. It had been a tossup with them whether to buy New Thought, Christian Science, or a good standard high-church model of Episcopalianism.”

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Sinclair Lewis livre Babbitt

Babbitt (1922), Ch. 30

“Maybe he was not a good-enough Christian to get the proper zest out of mortifying his indolent flesh.”

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Sinclair Lewis

The God-Seeker (1949), Ch. 15

“Slow yellow river flowing, willows that gesture in tepid August airs, and four children playing at greatness, as, doubtless, great men themselves must play.”

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Sinclair Lewis livre Ann Vickers

Ann Vickers (1933) First lines.

“A village in a country which is taking pains to become altogether standardized and pure, which aspires to succeed Victorian England as the chief mediocrity of the world, is no longer merely provincial, no longer downy and restful in its leaf-shadowed ignorance. It is a force seeking to conquer the earth… Sure of itself, it bullies other civilizations, as a traveling salesman in a brown derby conquers the wisdom of China and tacks advertisements of cigarettes over arches for centuries dedicate to the sayings of Confucius. Such a society functions admirably in the production of cheap automobiles, dollar watches, and safety razors. But it is not satisfied until the entire world also admits that the end and joyous purpose of living is to ride in flivvers, to make advertising-pictures of dollar watches, and in the twilight to sit talking not of love and courage but of the convenience of safety razors.”

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Sinclair Lewis livre Main Street

Main Street (1920)

“They've worked out elaborate charts classifying all intellectual occupations and interests, with the methods and materials and tools, and especially the goals—the aims, the ideals, the moral purposes—that are suited to each of them. Really tremendous! Why, a musician or an engineer, for example, could look at his chart and tell accurately whether he was progressing fast enough, at his age, and if not, just what his trouble was, and the remedy.”

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Sinclair Lewis livre Arrowsmith

Arrowsmith (1925), Ch. 40

“Hours then of blasphemy and fury and debate, all in the theological terms that seem shocking to the literate citizens today, who believe in God but just don't care to mention him or any of the other lowly friends they knew before they went to Yale.”

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Sinclair Lewis

The God-Seeker (1949), Ch. 6

“With… small-town life… there are hundreds of thousands… who are not content. The more intelligent young people… flee to the cities… and… stay there, seldom returning even for holidays. The reason, Carol insisted… 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 the prohibition of happiness. It is the slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is dullness made God. A savorless people, gulping tasteless food and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking-chairs prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world.”

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Sinclair Lewis livre Main Street

Main Street (1920)

“Deacon Uriel Gadd was a man of integrity, granite-rough and lichen-coated. The punishment in his rheumatism, clearly sent of God, and the defection of his son Elijah, had weakened him only in making him somewhat less contemptuous of his sentimental son Aaron. All other persons he divided into fools, scoundrels and the blessedly elect, with only himself indisputably in the last class.”

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Sinclair Lewis

The God-Seeker (1949), Ch. 6

“The reason for it all, nobody who is actually engaged in it can tell you, except the bosses, who believe that these sacred rites of composing dull letters and solemnly filing them away are observed in order that they may buy the large automobiles in which they do not have time to take the air.”

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Sinclair Lewis livre The Job

The Job (1917)

“An ugly woodshed that's there, right on the ground, is handsomer to me than a ten-story temple that isn't there.”

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Sinclair Lewis

The God-Seeker (1949), Ch. 57

“Despite strikes and riots all over the country, bloodily put down by the Minute Men, Windrip's power in Washington was maintained. The most liberal four members of the Supreme Court resigned and were replaced by surprisingly unknown lawyers who called President Windrip by his first name. A number of Congressmen were still being "protected" in the District of Columbia jail; others had seen the blinding light forever shed by the goddess Reason and happily returned to the Capitol. The Minute Men were increasingly loyal—they were still unpaid volunteers, but provided with "expense accounts" considerably larger than the pay of the regular troops. Never in American history had the adherents of a President been so well satisfied; they were not only appointed to whatever political jobs there were but to ever so many that really were not; and with such annoyances as Congressional Investigations hushed, the official awarders of contracts were on the merriest of terms with all contractors.... One veteran lobbyist for steel corporations complained that there was no more sport in his hunting—you were not only allowed but expected to shoot all government purchasing-agents sitting.”

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Sinclair Lewis livre It Can't Happen Here

It Can't Happen Here (1935)

“Babbitt looked up irritably from the comic strips in the Evening Advocate. They composed his favorite literature and art, these illustrated chronicles in which Mr. Mutt hit Mr. Jeff with a rotten egg, and Mother corrected Father's vulgarisms by means of a rolling-pin. With the solemn face of a devotee, breathing heavily through his open mouth, he plodded nightly through every picture, and during the rite he detested interruptions. Furthermore, he felt that on the subject of Shakespeare he wasn't really an authority. Neither the Advocate-Times, the Evening Advocate, nor the Bulletin of the Zenith Chamber of Commerce had ever had an editorial on the matter, and until one of them had spoken he found it hard to form an original opinion.”

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Sinclair Lewis livre Babbitt

Babbitt (1922), Ch. 6

“He still had a fragment of his boyhood belief that congressmen were persons of intelligence and importance.”

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Sinclair Lewis livre Arrowsmith

Arrowsmith (1925), Ch. 22

“Probably none of the Weagles gave five minutes' thought a year to theology or ecclesiology, except Ora, who occasionally stirred up a lot of interesting family irritation by announcing that he was going to become a Catholic, an Episcopalian, a Buddhist, or a Seventh Day Adventist.”

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Sinclair Lewis

Work of Art (1934) Ch. 4

“Good sense from a child was not necessarily contemptible beside foolishness from a grown-up.”

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Sinclair Lewis

The God-Seeker (1949), Ch. 3

“Mr. Blingham, and may he fry in his own cooking-oil, was assistant treasurer of the Flaver-Saver Company.”

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Sinclair Lewis livre Kingsblood Royal

Kingsblood Royal (1947) First lines.

“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”

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Sinclair Lewis

Many variants of this exist, but the earliest known incident of such a comment appears to be a partial quote from James Waterman Wise, Jr., reported in a 1936 issue of The Christian Century: "in a recent address here before the liberal John Reed club [Wise] said that Hearst and Coughlin are the two chief exponents of fascism in America. If fascism comes, he added, it will not be identified with any 'shirt' movement, nor with an 'insignia,' but it will probably be 'wrapped up in the American flag and heralded as a plea for liberty and preservation of the constitution.'"
Another early quote is that of Halford E. Luccock, in Keeping Life Out of Confusion (1938): "When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled 'made in Germany'; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, 'Americanism.'" (This quote is also attributed in a New York Times article from September 12, 1938, page 15 as having been given in one of Luccock's sermons.)
Harrison Evans Salisbury in 1971 remarked about Lewis: "Sinclair Lewis aptly predicted in It Can't Happen Here that if fascism came to America it would come wrapped in the flag and whistling 'The Star Spangled Banner.'"
Source: The Christian Century, Volume 53, Feb 5, 1936, p. 245
Source: Misattributed, p. 29, The Many Americas Shall Be One, Harrison Evans Salisbury. Published by W. W. Norton, 1971.

“Why are you so afraid of the word 'Fascism,' Doremus? Just a word—just a word! And might not be so bad, with all the lazy bums we got panhandling relief nowadays, and living on my income tax and yours—not so worse to have a real Strong Man, like Hitler or Mussolini—like Napoleon or Bismarck in the good old days—and have 'em really run the country and make it efficient and prosperous again. 'Nother words, have a doctor who won't take any back-chat, but really boss the patient and make him get well whether he likes it or not!”

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Sinclair Lewis livre It Can't Happen Here

It Can't Happen Here (1935)

“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 final quarter keep you alive.”

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Sinclair Lewis livre It Can't Happen Here

It Can't Happen Here (1935)

“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 Throne.”

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Sinclair Lewis livre It Can't Happen Here

President Buzz Windrip in his autobiography "Zero Hour."
It Can't Happen Here (1935)

“Being a man given to oratory and high principles, he enjoyed the sound of his own vocabulary and the warmth of his own virtue.”

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Sinclair Lewis livre Babbitt

Babbitt (1922), Ch. 6

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