Lewis H. Lapham Quotes

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.

Lewis H. Lapham

• Today
• Society
• Culture
• Threatening
• Anti-utopianism

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Quotes to Explore

• I spend my life essentially alone at a computer. That doesn't change. I have the same challenges every day.

  

  Dan Brown
  • Life
  • Change
  • Alone

• I enjoy pushing my characters to the limit. No matter how far out there I go, I look for things that make the characters human.

  

  Dana Carvey
  • Enjoy
  • Look
  • Limit

• General Giap was one of the most brilliant military strategists of our era, who in Dien Bien Phu was able to place missile launchers in remote, mountainous jungles, something the yankee and European military officers considered impossible.

  

  Fidel Castro
  • Military
  • Place
  • Impossible

• I was in New York. I had been doing theater for many years, and then I got hired to a little part - they weren't calling it an extra, but I didn't have lines. It was a 'featured' part.

  

  J. K. Simmons
  • Years
  • Doing
  • New York

• What's interesting about Stephen Baldwin is that me and Dana Gould were originally cast for 'Bio-Dome' – but Pauly Shore and Baldwin ended up doing it. So there's a little movie trivia for ya.

  

  Harland Williams
  • Movie
  • Interesting
  • Ended

• All performers get on stage because they need to feel love from an audience. I might appear confident, but those three seconds before I get out there, I'm a mess. But I have to take the risk; otherwise, I'd be miserable and would feel like I wasn't seeing through my personal destiny.

  

  Idina Menzel
  • Risk
  • Feel
  • Audience

• In combat sports, personalities are what draw.

  

  Daniel Bryan
  • Sports
  • Draw
  • Personalities

• Think what evil creeps liberals would be if their plans to enfeeble the individual, exhaust the economy, impede the rule of law, and cripple national defense were guided by a coherent ideology instead of smug ignorance.

  

  P. J. O'Rourke
  • Law
  • Evil
  • Ignorance

• I think if you talk to my colleagues, I was less than a fearsome individual.

  

  Karl Rove
  • Think
  • Talk
  • Colleagues

• Back in 1999 and 2000, a few of us... a very few of us... Douglas Clegg, Seth Godin and I... offered free electronic copies of our books in an effort to reach an audience we otherwise wouldn't have reached and to test out a new marketing concept for books. Despite the industry screaming we were crazy, it worked.

  

  M. J. Rose
  • Free
  • Crazy
  • Effort

• I always loved all kinds of music. I would watch musicals a lot as a kid, on TV, watch the Fred Astaire movies. I'd watch 'The Wizard of Oz.' I was a big Jerry Lewis fan, and they'd have these big bands and someone singing - some siren, or some guy singing some gorgeous song. I was always enamored of that style of music.

  

  Queen Latifah
  • Music
  • Guy
  • Song

• If I could set a world record, it would be that I have 150 business partners, all with thriving businesses of their own that started with nothing and I made the difference to make them all billionaires.

  

  Barbara Corcoran
  • World
  • Business
  • Own

• I come from a generation that suffered school lessons in portacabins and crumbling hospitals. I tell you one thing, for the eighteen years they were in power the Tories did nothing to fix the roof when the sun was shining.

  

  Ed Miliband
  • School
  • Power
  • Sun

• I redefined how I ate and exercised and have continued to keep that up because it feels great.

  

  Beck Bennett
  • Up
  • Great
  • Because

• My parents are divorced, and seeing that was really painful for me. Really painful for me. But that's also a big part of why I'm intrigued by the dynamics between people – because I was close to something that fell apart.

  

  Banks
  • People
  • Parents
  • Painful

• My husband and I have season tickets to the Giants games, and we go there as fans to enjoy it.

  

  Nancy Pelosi
  • Husband
  • Enjoy
  • Season

• The entertainment business is not the be-all and end-all for me.

  

  Dan Aykroyd
  • Business
  • Me
  • Entertainment

• I get the feeling that people from outside the world of contemporary art see it as deserving of mockery, in an emperor's-new-clothes sort of way. I think that's not right and that it's just because they don't understand the discourse.

  

  Rachel Kushner
  • People
  • World
  • Art

• The mind itself is of the form of all, i.e., of soul, God and world; when it becomes of the form of the Self through knowledge, there is release, which is of the nature of Brahman: this is the teaching.

  

  Ramana Maharshi
  • World
  • God
  • Mind

• I used to be the hippest of them all. I used to know everything about everything. I used to read about everything that was going on, and I knew everybody's name and anybody in pop culture. Anything that was written about me, I would read.

  

  Eddie Murphy
  • Culture
  • Me
  • Name

• There are two options for any society: total prohibition as in a totalitarian state, or total license. Both avoid the ardours of decision. Both have the attraction of certainty. The difficult option is to decide where the line should be drawn and this, surely, is the responsiblity of any civilized and democratic country.

  

  P. D. James
  • Country
  • Society
  • Decision

• There are more slaves alive today than all the people stolen from Africa in the time of the transatlantic slave trade. Put another way, today's slave population is greater than the population of Canada, and six times greater than the population of Israel.

  

  Kevin Bales
  • People
  • Time
  • Today

• Love will make a way out of no way.

  

  Lynda Barry

• 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.

  

  Lewis H. Lapham
  • Today
  • Society
  • Culture