Best 85 quotes of Lewis H. Lapham on MyQuotes

About the presence of death and dying I don't remember the society in the 1950s being so skittish as it has since become. People still died at home, among relatives and friends, often in the care of a family physician. Death was still to be seen sitting in the parlor, hanging in a butcher shop, sometimes lying in the street.

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.

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.

Among all the emotions, the rich have the least talent for love. It is possible to love one's dog, dress or duck-shooting hat, but a human being presents a more difficult problem. The rich might wish to experience feelings of affection, but it is almost impossible to chip away the enamel of their narcissism. They take up all the space in all the mirrors in the house. Their children, who represent the most present and therefore the most annoying claim on their attention, usually receive the brunt of their irritation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

From authors whom I read more than once I learn to value the weight of words and to delight in their meter and cadence -- in Gibbon's polyphonic counterpoint and Guedalla's command of the subjunctive, in Mailer's hyperbole and Dillard's similes, in Twain's invectives and burlesques with which he set the torch of his ferocious wit to the hospitality tents of the world's colossal humbug . . . 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.

Further strengthenings of the self-centered instinct for survival recruit even greater numbers of people into some sort of ring of fellowship (church or gender, red state or blue) by populating the terra incognita outside the ring with enough barbarians to verify the existence of a civilization within--to define the preferred stock by what, as all good people agree, it decidedly is not.

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.

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.

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

I begin to understand that failure is its own reward. It is in the effort to close the distance between the work imagined and the work achieved wherein it is to be found that the ceaseless labor is the freedom of play, that what’s at stake isn’t a reflection in the mirror of fame but the escape from the prison of the self.

If in the well and truly made martini DeVoto finds "water of life" and the blessing to the spirit, so also DeVoto's The Hour brings to its readers the breath of life and a vision of themselves made generous, indomitable and wise.

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

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

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.

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

It is no accident that banks resemble temples, preferably Greek, and that the supplicants who come to perform the rites of deposit and withdrawal instinctively lower their voices into the registers of awe. Even the most junior tellers acquire within weeks of their employment the officiousness of hierophants tending an eternal flame.

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

It is the fear of death - 24/7 in every shade of hospital white and doomsday black--that sells the pharmaceutical, political, financial, film, and food product promising to make good the wish to live forever.

Label celebrity a consumer society's most precious consumer product, and eventually it becomes the hero with a thousand faces, the packaging of the society's art and politics, the framework of its commerce, and the stuff of its religion.

Leadership consists not in degrees of technique but in traits of character; it requires moral rather than athletic or intellectual effort, and it imposes on both leader and follower alike the burdens of self-restraint.

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

Let the corporations do as they please -- pillage the environment, falsify their advertising, rig the securities markets -- and it is none of the federal government's business to interfere with the will of heaven.

Let the rabbit of free enterprise out of its velveteen bag and too many people would have to be fired, too much idiocy exposed to the light of judgment or ridicule, too much vanity sacrificed to the fires of efficiency. Such a catastrophe obviously would threaten the American way of life, to say nothing of the belief in free markets.

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

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. Money votes socialist or monarchist, finds a profit in pornography or translations from the Bible, commissions Rembrandt and underwrites the technology of Auschwitz. It acquires its meaning from the uses to which it is put.

More than illness or death, the American journalist fears standing alone against the whim of his owners or the prejudices of his audience. Deprive William Safire of the insignia of the New York Times, and he would have a hard time selling his truths to a weekly broadsheet in suburban Duluth.

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.

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.

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.

Nobody suffers the pain of birth or the anguish of loving a child in order for presidents to make wars, for governments to feed on the substance of their people, for insurance companies to cheat the young and rob the old.

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.

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

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

Power broken into a thousand pieces can be hidden and disowned. If no individual or institution possesses the authority to act without of everybody else in the room, then nobody is at fault if anything goes wrong.

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.

Rumors and reports of man's relation with animals are the world's oldest news stories, headlined in the stars of the zodiac, posted on the walls of prehistoric caves, inscribed in the languages of Egyptian myth, Greek philosophy, Hindu religion, Christian art, our own DNA. Belonging within the circle of mankind's intimate acquaintance ... constant albeit speechless companions, they supplied energies fit to be harnessed or roasted.

Seeing is believing, and if an American success is to count for anything in the world it must be clothed in the raiment of property. As often as not it isn't the money itself that means anything; it is the use of money as the currency of the soul.

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.

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.