Lewis H. Lapham Quotes

64 Sourced Quotes

Dissent is what rescues democracy from a quiet death behind closed doors.

Lewis H. Lapham
The American press is, and always has been, a booster press, its editorial pages characteristically advancing the same arguments as the paid advertising copy.

Lewis H. Lapham
Democracy is a difficult art of government, demanding of its citizens high ratios of courage and literacy, and at the moment we lack both the necessary habits of mind and a sphere of common reference.

Lewis H. Lapham
Great power constitutes its own argument, and it never has much trouble drumming up friends, applause, sympathetic exegesis, and a band.

Lewis H. Lapham
As a child growing up in the precincts of wealth, and later as a college student, newspaper reporter and resident of New York's Upper East Side, I got used to listening to the talk of financial killings and sexual misalliance that animates the conversation of the rich and the familiars of the rich.

Lewis H. Lapham
Once having proclaimed our loyalty to the abstract idea that all men are created equal, we do everything in our power to prove ourselves unequal. Among the world's peoples, none other belongs to so many clubs, associations, committees and secret societies.

Lewis H. Lapham
We need not seek our own best selves, and in the meantime we inoculate ourselves against the viruses of age and idealism, which, as the advertising agencies well know, depress sales and sour the feasts of consumption.

Lewis H. Lapham
To acknowledge the truth of the old Arab proverb that says we have less reason to fear what might happen tomorrow than to beware what happened yesterday is also to say that we have more reason to look to the past — history as the phoenix in the attic — for the hope of the future.

Lewis H. Lapham
Since the eighteenth century the immense expansion of the worlds wealth has come about as a result of a correspondingly immense expansion of credit, which in turn has demanded increasingly stupendous suspensions of disbelief.

Lewis H. Lapham
The substitution of meaning accounts for the grasping of misers as well as the extravagance of spendthrifts. Karl Marx well understood this peculiar transformation of flesh into coin.

Lewis H. Lapham
We have nothing else with which to build the future except the lumber of the past — history exploited as a natural resource and applied technology, telling us that the story painted on the old walls and printed in the old books is also our own.

Lewis H. Lapham
But I had forgotten about the seven bowls of God's wrath stored in the minds of some of the unhappier prophets on the reactionary right,...

Lewis H. Lapham
Seeking the invisible through the imagery of the visible, the Americans never can get quite all the way to the end of the American dream.

Lewis H. Lapham
The pose of innocence is as mandatory as the ability to eat banquet food and endure the scourging of the press.

Lewis H. Lapham
Wars might come and go, but the seven o'clock news lives forever.

Lewis H. Lapham
But the line of thought that I'd been chasing for several days was implicit in the ruins of the old Roman Empire, which gradually destroyed itself by substituting the faith in a legion of miraculous words for the strength of armies and the weight of walls.

Lewis H. Lapham
It isn't money itself that causes the trouble, but the use of money as votive offering and pagan ornament.

Lewis H. Lapham
Except in a few well-publicized instances (enough to lend credence to the iconography painted on the walls of the media), the rigorous practice of rugged individualism usually leads to poverty, ostracism and disgrace. The rugged individualist is too often mistaken for the misfit, the maverick, the spoilsport, the sore thumb.

Lewis H. Lapham
A certain kind of rich man afflicted with the symptoms of moral dandyism sooner or later comes to the conclusion that it isn't enough merely to make money. He feels obliged to hold views, to espouse causes and elect Presidents, to explain to a trembling world how and why the world went wrong. The spectacle is nearly always comic.

Lewis H. Lapham
Never in the history of the world have so many people been so rich; never in the history off the world have so many of those same people felt themselves so poor.

Lewis H. Lapham
If a foreign country doesn't look like a middle-class suburb of Dallas or Detroit, then obviously the natives must be dangerous as well as badly dressed.

Lewis H. Lapham
The state of perpetual emptiness is, of course, very good for business.

Lewis H. Lapham
The world goes on as before, and it turns out that nobody else seems to to notice the unbearable lightness of being.

Lewis H. Lapham
I sometimes think that the American story is the one about the reading of the will.

Lewis H. Lapham
As many as six out of ten American adults have never read a book of any kind, and the bulletins from the nation's educational frontiers read like the casualty reports from a lost war.

Lewis H. Lapham
Most of the ladies and gentlemen who mourn the passing of the nation's leaders wouldn't know a leader if they saw one. If they had the bad luck to come across a leader, they would find out that he might demand something from them, and this impertinence would put an abrupt and indignant end to their wish for his return.

Lewis H. Lapham
Given lesser opportunities, Kissinger would have done very well as a talk show host. Fortunately for him, although not so fortunately for the United States, he found his patron in Nelson Rockefeller instead of William Paley.

Lewis H. Lapham
At this late stage in the history of American capitalism I'm not sure I know how much testimony still needs to be presented to establish the relation between profit and theft.

Lewis H. Lapham
Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past.

Lewis H. Lapham
A society that presumes a norm of violence and celebrates aggression, whether in the subway, on the football field, or in the conduct of its business, cannot help making celebrities of the people who would destroy it.

Lewis H. Lapham