Lewis H. Lapham Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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Nobody wants to say, at least not for publication, that we live in a society that cares as much about the humanities as it cares about the color of the rain in Tashkent.
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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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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.
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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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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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Dissent is what rescues democracy from a quiet death behind closed doors.
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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.