Lewis H. Lapham Quotes

Leadership consists not in degrees of technique but in traits of character.

I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words.

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.

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.

People may expect too much of journalism. Not only do they expect it to be entertaining, they expect it to be true.

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

The survival of American democracy depends less on the size of its armies than on the capacity of its individual citizens to rely... on the strength of their own thought.

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

America is about class. To pretend that it isn't is very ignorant. No society has ever existed without some kind of a ruling class.

Anti-utopianism continues to suffuse our culture...Today few imagine that society can be fundamentally improved, and those who do are seen as at best deluded, at worst threatening.

Unlike every other nation in the world, the United States defines itself as a hypothesis and constitutes itself as an argument.

The future is an empty canvas or a blank sheet of paper, and if you have the courage of your own thought and your own observation you can make of it what you will

The leading cause of death is birth.

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

The supply of government exceeds demand.

Of what does politics consist except the making of imperfect decisions, many of them unjust and quite a few of them deadly?

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

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

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

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

Most American cities shop 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Love of country follows from the exercise of its freedoms, not from pride in its fleets or its armies.

When we talk about the foreign, the question becomes one of us versus them. But in the end, is one just the opposite side of the other?

Youth as glimpsed by its elders is a story that comes from afar, showing itself as either lovely to look at or a torment to endure.

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

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.

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?

If you wear a suit, you can talk to anybody.

His administration apparently means to define itself as a television program instead of a government...I don't know if it can please both its sponsors and its intended audience.

Power broken into a thousand pieces can be hidden and disowned.

The practice of our democracy depends on a sense of, and knowledge of, history in the same way that playing in the World Series requires a bat and a ball.

The American oligarchy increasingly has less in common with the American people than it does with the equivalent oligarchies in Germany or Mexico or Japan.

Now that Mr. Carter has made a book of his diary, an adoring memoir entitled Keeping Faith, the notes read like a collection of letters sent from scout camp.

[For American consumer society], the country's reserves of ignorance constitute a natural resource as precious as the Mississippi River or the long-lost herds of buffalo.

Democracy is born in dirt, nourished by the digging up and turning over as much of it as can be brought within reach of a television camera or subpoena.

Recollections of early childhood bear comparison to fairy tales, and ... youth remains an unknown country to whose bourn no traveler returns except as the agent of a foreign power.

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

The days of my youth I remember as nearly always in need of explanation, and not as much fun as advertised in the promotions for board games and breakfast cereal.

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

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

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

History is not what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago; it's a story about what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago.

The supply of government exceeds the demand.