Quote#Time
The reason for it all, nobody who is actually engaged in it can tell…
Quote bySinclair Lewis · 1885–1951
Commonly attributed — not confirmed in an authoritative edition. Cited on Wikiquote to: The Job (1917).
English (original)
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.
— Sinclair Lewis
More from Sinclair Lewis
Fine, large, meaningless, general terms like romance and business can always be related. They take the place of thinking, and are highly useful to optimists and lecturers.
Mr. Wilkins came back and hemmed and hawed a good deal; he praised the work she hadn't considered well done, and pointed out faults in what she considered particularly clever achievements.
Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.
His entire system of theology was comprised in the Bible, which he never read, and the Methodist Church, which he rarely attended.
The trouble with this country is... that there're too many people going about saying "The trouble with this country is—"
This age, which should adjudge happiness to be as valuable as soap or munitions, would never come so long as the workers accepted the testimony of paid spokesmen... to the effect that they were contented and happy, rather than the evidence …