Lewis H. Lapham Quotes
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We are a people captivated by the power and romance of metaphor, forever seeking the invisible through the image of the visible.
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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.
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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.
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Dissent is what rescues democracy from a quiet death behind closed doors.
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Of what does politics consist except the making of imperfect decisions, many of them unjust and quite a few of them deadly?
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The supply of government exceeds demand.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Nobody wants to say, at least not for publication, that we live in a society that cares as much about the humanities as it cares about the color of the rain in Tashkent.
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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.
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I sometimes think that the American story is the one about the reading of the will.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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Unlike every other nation in the world, the United States defines itself as a hypothesis and constitutes itself as an argument.
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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.
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The leading cause of death is birth.