Lewis H. Lapham Quotes
-
Surely they knew that the very idea of the future came in an American box - complete with instructions for assembling a Constitution, a MacDonald's hamburger franchise, a row of Marriot hotels and a First Amendment.
-
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.
-
We are a people captivated by the power and romance of metaphor, forever seeking the invisible through the image of the visible.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Of what does politics consist except the making of imperfect decisions, many of them unjust and quite a few of them deadly?
-
The supply of government exceeds demand.
-
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.
-
Dissent is what rescues democracy from a quiet death behind closed doors.
-
Nobody wants to say, at least not for publication, that we live in a society that cares as much about the humanities as it cares about the color of the rain in Tashkent.
-
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.
-
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?
-
I sometimes think that the American story is the one about the reading of the will.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Unlike every other nation in the world, the United States defines itself as a hypothesis and constitutes itself as an argument.
-
The pose of innocence is as mandatory as the ability to eat banquet food and endure the scourging of the press.
-
The leading cause of death is birth.