Lewis H. Lapham Short Quotes

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

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

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

Lewis H. Lapham
The rich, like well brought up children, are meant to be seen, not heard.

Lewis H. Lapham
By the word "liberty" they meant liberty for property, not liberty for persons.

Lewis H. Lapham
In the garden of tabloid delight, there is always a clean towel and another song.

Lewis H. Lapham
If we could let go of our faith in money, who knows what we might put in its place?

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

Lewis H. Lapham
Unlike any other business in the United States, sports must preserve an illusion of perfect innocence.

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

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
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
We are a people captivated by the power and romance of metaphor, forever seeking the invisible through the image of the visible.

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

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
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
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 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
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
I never can pass by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without thinking of it not as a gallery of living portraits but as a cemetery of tax-deductible wealth.

Lewis H. Lapham
Nobody wants to say, at least not for publication, that we live in a society that cares as much about the humanities as it cares about the color of the rain in Tashkent.

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
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
We squander the truth of our inheritance if we don't know how or why it was accumulated, against what odds, with what force of the human imagination and which powers of expression.

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
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
Money is like fire, an element as little troubled by moralizing as earth, air and water. Men can employ it as a tool or they can dance around it as if it were the incarnation of a god.

Lewis H. Lapham
Most American cities show to their best advantage when seen from a height or from a distance, at a point where the ugliness of the buildings dissolves into the beauty of an abstraction.

Lewis H. Lapham