In fact there was but one thing wrong with the Babbitt house: It was not a home.

She had become so dully habituated to married life that in her full matronliness she was as sexless as an anemic nun.

By sliding the beds into low closets the bedromms were converted into living-rooms. The kitchen were cupboards each containing an electric range, a copper sink, a glass refrigerator, and, intermittently, a Balkan maid.

To them, the Romantic Hero was no longer the knight, the wandering poet, the cow-puncher, the aviator, nor the brave young district attorney, but the great sales-manager,

Finally, but most important, our Standardized Citizen, even if he is a bachelor, is a lover of the Little Ones, a supporter of the hearthstone which is the basic foundation of our civilization, first, last, and all the time, and the thing that most distinguishes us from the decayed nations of Europe.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti,

Now, I haven't got one particle of race-prejudice. I'm the first to be glad when a nigger succeeds –– so long as he stays where he belongs and doesn't try to usurp the rightful authority and business ability of the white man.

Mrs. Babbitt's dressing-table with toilet-articles of almost solid silver, the plain twin beds, between them a small table holding a standard electric bedside lamp, a glass for water, and a standard bedside book with colored illustrations – what particular book it was cannot be ascertained, since no one had ever opened it.

With them were six wives, more or less - it was hard to tell, so early in the evening, as at first glance they all looked alike, and as they all said, "Oh, ISN'T this nice!" in the same tone of determined liveliness.

At that moment a G.A.R veteran was dying. He had come from the Civil War straight to a farm which, though it was officially within the city-limits of Zenith, was primitive as the backwoods. He had never ridden in a motor car, never seen a bath-tub, never read any book save the Bible, McGuffey’s readers, and religious tracts; and he believed that the earth is flat, that the English are the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel, and that the United States is a democracy.