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Lewis H. Lapham Quotes
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Unlike every other other nation in the world, the United States defines itself as a hypothesis and constitutes itself as an argument.
Lewis H. Lapham
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The playing field is more sacred than the stock exchange, more blessed than Capital Hill or the vaults of Fort Knox. The diamond and the gridiron - and, to a lesser degree, the court, the rink, the track, and the ring - embody the American dream of Eden.
Lewis H. Lapham
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Democracy assumes conflict not only as the normal but also as the necessary condition of its existence, the structure of the idea resembling a suspension bridge dependent upon the balance between countervailing forces.
Lewis H. Lapham
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What kind of people do we wish to become, and how do we know an American when we see one? Is it possible to pursue a common purpose without a common history or a standard text?
Lewis H. Lapham
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Surely they knew that the very idea of the future came in an American box - complete with instructions for assembling a Constitution, a MacDonald's hamburger franchise, a row of Marriot hotels and a First Amendment.
Lewis H. Lapham
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Dissent is what rescues democracy from a quiet death behind closed doors.
Lewis H. Lapham
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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
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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
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Great power constitutes its own argument, and it never has much trouble drumming up friends, applause, sympathetic exegesis, and a band.
Lewis H. Lapham
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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The pose of innocence is as mandatory as the ability to eat banquet food and endure the scourging of the press.
Lewis H. Lapham
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Wars might come and go, but the seven o'clock news lives forever.
Lewis H. Lapham
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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
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It isn't money itself that causes the trouble, but the use of money as votive offering and pagan ornament.
Lewis H. Lapham
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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
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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
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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
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Quote of the day
That liberty is a great thing we may know from our own feelings, and we may likewise judge so from the conduct of the white-people, in the late war.
Jupiter Hammon
Lewis H. Lapham
Creative Commons
Born:
January 8, 1935
(age 89)
Bio:
Lewis Henry Lapham is an American writer. He was the editor of the American monthly Harper's Magazine from 1976 until 1981, and from 1983 until 2006.
Known for:
Money and Class In America (1988)
Gag rule (2004)
Lapham's Rules of Influence (1999)
Waiting for the barbarians (1997)
Most used words:
american
money
history
people
united
states
rich
business
society
future
power
talk
class
walls
liberty
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