Sinclair Lewis Quote on Convincing Someone of What Feeds Them

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It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis
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It Can't Happen Here Quotes Showing 151-180 of 197

"I tell you, an honest man gets sick when he hears the word 'Liberty' today, after what the Republicans did to it!"
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

"Any person advocating Communism, Socialism, or Anarchism, advocating refusal to enlist in case of war, or advocating alliance with Russia in any war whatsoever, shall be subject to trial for high treason, with a minimum penalty of twenty years at hard labor in prison, and a maximum of death on the gallows, or other form of execution which the judges may find convenient."
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

"For they were thieves not only of wages but of honor. To their purpose they could quote not only Scripture but Jefferson."
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

"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 folks to your point of view much better in the evening, when they are tired out from work and not so likely to resist you, than at any other time of day. Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip."
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

"God, sir, men's souls and blood are not eggshells for tyrants to break!"
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

"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."
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

"The conspicuous fault of the Jeffersonian Party, like the personal fault of Senator Trowbridge, was that it represented integrity and reason, in a year when the electorate hungered for frisky emotions,"
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

"Ten, which condemned the Negroes—since nothing so elevates a dispossessed farmer or a factory worker on relief as to have some race, any race, on which he can look down;"
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

"Doremus Jessup, so inconspicuous an observer, watching Senator Windrip from so humble a Boeotia, could not explain his power of bewitching large audiences. 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 country store.

Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only wings of a windmill. Seven years before his present credo—derived from Lee Sarason, Hitler, Gottfried Feder, Rocco, and probably the revue Of Thee I Sing—little Buzz, back home, had advocated nothing more revolutionary than better beef stew in the county poor-farms, and plenty of graft for loyal machine politicians, with jobs for their brothers-in-law, nephews, law partners, and creditors.

Doremus had never heard Windrip during one of his orgasms of oratory, but he had been told by political reporters that under the spell you thought Windrip was Plato, but that on the way home you could not remember anything he had said.

There were two things, they told Doremus, that distinguished this prairie Demosthenes. He was an actor of genius. There was no more overwhelming actor on the stage, in the motion pictures, nor even in the pulpit. He would whirl arms, bang tables, glare from mad eyes, vomit Biblical wrath from a gaping mouth; but he would also coo like a nursing mother, beseech like an aching lover, and in between tricks would coldly and almost contemptuously jab his crowds with figures and facts—figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect.

But below this surface stagecraft was his uncommon natural ability to be authentically excited by and with his audience, and they by and with him. He could dramatize his assertion that he was neither a Nazi nor a Fascist but a Democrat—a homespun Jeffersonian-Lincolnian-Clevelandian-Wilsonian Democrat—and (sans scenery and costume) make you see him veritably defending the Capitol against barbarian hordes, the while he innocently presented as his own warm-hearted Democratic inventions, every anti-libertarian, anti-Semitic madness of Europe.

Aside from his dramatic glory, Buzz Windrip was a Professional Common Man.

Oh, he was common enough. 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 exulted, maybe he could get Mr. Ford to come to supper at the White House), and the superiority of anyone who possessed a million dollars. He regarded spats, walking sticks, caviar, titles, tea-drinking, poetry not daily syndicated in newspapers and all foreigners, possibly excepting the British, as degenerate.

But he was the Common Man twenty-times-magnified by his oratory, so that while the other Commoners could understand his every purpose, which was exactly the same as their own, they saw him towering among them, and they raised hands to him in worship."
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

"Day on day he waited. 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. Waiting, and its brother death, seem so contented."
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

"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?"
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

"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?"
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

"Except, perhaps, that he was an atheist in theology, he was a strict orthodox Christian."
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

"It had been cold in Vermont, with early snow, but the white drifts lay to the earth so quietly, in unstained air, that the world seemed a silver-painted carnival, left to silence. Even on a moonless night, a pale radiance came from the snow, from the earth itself, and the stars were drops of quicksilver."
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

"Most of the mortgaged farmers.

Most of the white-collar workers who had been unemployed these three years and four and five.

Most of the people on relief rolls who wanted more relief.

Most of the suburbanites who could not meet the installment payments on the electric washing machine.

Such large sections of the American Legion as believed that only Senator Windrip would secure for them, and perhaps increase, the bonus.

Such popular Myrtle Boulevard or Elm Avenue preachers as, spurred by the examples of Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin, believed they could get useful publicity out of supporting a slightly queer program that promised prosperity without anyone's having to work for it.

The remnants of the Kuklux Klan, and such leaders of the American Federation of Labor as felt they had been inadequately courted and bepromised by the old-line politicians, and the non-unionized common laborers who felt they had been inadequately courted by the same A.F. of L.

Back-street and over-the-garage lawyers who had never yet wangled governmental jobs.

The Lost Legion of the Anti-Saloon League—since it was known that, though he drank a lot, Senator Windrip also praised teetotalism a lot, while his rival, Walt Trowbridge, though he drank but little, said nothing at all in support of the Messiahs of Prohibition. These messiahs had not found professional morality profitable of late, with the Rockefellers and Wanamakers no longer praying with them nor paying.

Besides these necessitous petitioners, a goodish number of burghers who, while they were millionaires, yet maintained that their prosperity had been sorely checked by the fiendishness of the bankers in limiting their credit.

These were the supporters who looked to Berzelius Windrip to play the divine raven and feed them handsomely when he should become President, and from such came most of the fervid elocutionists who campaigned for him through September and October."
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

"American whose fathers have lived in the country for over two generations is so utterly different from any other American."
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

"But now, when the shameless fools and the advocates of Communism try to hold pacifist meetings — why, my friends, in the past five months, since January first, no less than seventy-six such exhibitionistic orgies have been raided by their fellow students,"
― Sinclair Lewis, IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE: WHAT WILL HAPPEN WHEN AMERICA HAS A DICTATOR ?

"Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut 'Liberty cabbage' and somebody actually proposed calling German measles 'Liberty measles'? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia!"
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

"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?"
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

"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."
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

"Louis was altogether convinced that if the ignorant politicians would keep their dirty hands off banking and the stock exchange and hours of labor for salesmen in department stores, then everyone in the country would profit, as beneficiaries of increased business, and all of them (including the retail clerks) be rich as Aga Khan."
― Sinclair Lewis, IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE: WHAT WILL HAPPEN WHEN AMERICA HAS A DICTATOR ?

"Why, America's the only free nation on earth. Besides! Country's too big for a revolution. No, no! Couldn't happen here!"
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

"We ought to keep all these foreigners out of the country, and what I mean, the Kikes just as much as the Wops and Hunkies and Chinks."
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

"and we need all these military monkeyshines and maybe a fool war (to conquer some sticky-hot country we don't want on a bet!) to put some starch and git into these marionettes we call our children?"
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

"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?"
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

"And they had the Jews and the Negroes to look down on, more and more. The M.M.'s saw to that. Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on."
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

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