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  "title": "Main Street",
  "slug": "main-street",
  "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/sinclair-lewis/main-street",
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  "author": {
    "name": "Sinclair Lewis",
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      "slug": "a-village-in-a-country",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/sinclair-lewis/main-street/a-village-in-a-country",
      "text": "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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      "slug": "i-think-perhaps",
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      "text": "I think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We're tired of drudging and sleeping and dying. We're tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We're tired of always deferring hope till the next generation. We're tired of hearing politicians and priests and cautious reformers... coax us, 'Be calm! Be patient! Just give us a bit more time and we’ll produce it; trust us; we’re wiser than you!' For ten thousand years they've said that. We want our Utopia now— and we're going to try our hands at it.",
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      "slug": "the-greatest-mystery",
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      "text": "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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      "slug": "think-how-much",
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      "text": "Think how much better it is to criticize conventional customs if you yourself live up to them, scrupulously. Then people can't say you're attacking them to excuse your own infractions. Yes, I've heard that plea.... 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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      "slug": "with-small-town-life",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/sinclair-lewis/main-street/with-small-town-life",
      "text": "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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      "slug": "she-was-not",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/sinclair-lewis/main-street/she-was-not",
      "text": "She was not a Respectable Married Woman but fully a human being.",
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      "slug": "it-has-not",
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      "text": "It has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditation upon the fact that he is better off than others.",
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      "slug": "maybe-if-they",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/sinclair-lewis/main-street/maybe-if-they",
      "text": "Maybe if they didn't know it beforehand, they wouldn't find out I'd ever been guilty of trying to think for myself.",
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      "slug": "i-went-to-a-denominational",
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      "text": "I went to a denominational college and learned that since dictating the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to explain it, God has never done much but creep around and try to catch us disobeying it.",
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      "slug": "there-are-two",
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      "text": "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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      "slug": "except-for-half",
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      "text": "Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement of ignorance which is so easy to come by. To be 'intellectual' or 'artistic' or, in their own word, to be 'highbrow,' is to be priggish and of dubious virtue.",
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      "slug": "she-had-her",
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      "text": "She had her freedom, and it was empty. The moment was not the highest of her life, but the lowest and most desolate, which was altogether excellent, for instead of slipping downward she began to climb.",
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