Lewis H. Lapham Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
The pose of innocence is as mandatory as the ability to eat banquet food and endure the scourging of the press.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The more prosperous and settled a nation, the more readily it tends to think of war as a regrettable accident; to nations less fortunate the chance of war presents itself as a possible bountiful friend.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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?
-
Nobody wants to say, at least not for publication, that we live in a society that cares as much about the humanities as it cares about the color of the rain in Tashkent.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Dissent is what rescues democracy from a quiet death behind closed doors.
-
Unlike every other nation in the world, the United States defines itself as a hypothesis and constitutes itself as an argument.
-
The leading cause of death is birth.