Lewis H. Lapham quotes - page 2

Wars might come and go, but the seven o'clock news lives forever. (Lewis H. Lapham)
Let the corporations do as they please -- pillage the environment, falsify their advertising, rig the securities markets -- and it is none of the federal government's business to interfere with the will of heaven. View quote
Lewis H. Lapham
Once having proclaimed our loyalty to the abstract idea that all men are created equal, we do everything in our power to prove ourselves unequal. Among the world's peoples, none other belongs to so many clubs, associations, committees and secret societies. View quote
Lewis H. Lapham
But I had forgotten about the seven bowls of God's wrath stored in the minds of some of the unhappier prophets on the reactionary right,... View quote
Lewis H. Lapham
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. View quote
Lewis H. Lapham
People may expect too much of journalism. Not only do they expect it to be entertaining, they expect it to be true. View quote
Lewis H. Lapham
Leadership consists not in degrees of technique but in traits of character; it requires moral rather than athletic or intellectual effort, and it imposes on both leader and follower alike the burdens of self-restraint. View quote
Lewis H. Lapham
Of what does politics consist except the making of imperfect decisions, many of them unjust and quite a few of them deadly? View quote
Lewis H. Lapham
Unlike any other business in the United States, sports must preserve an illusion of perfect innocence. View quote
Lewis H. Lapham
Nobody wants to say, at least not for publication, that we live in a society that cares as much about the humanities as it cares about the color of the rain in Tashkent. View quote
Lewis H. Lapham
Power broken into a thousand pieces can be hidden and disowned. (Lewis H. Lapham)
Well aware of both the continuity and contingency of human affairs, Adams and Madison searched the works of Tacitus and Voltaire and Locke like carpenters rummaging through their assortment of tools, knowing that all the pediments were jury-rigged, all the provisional, all the alliances temporary. View quote
Lewis H. Lapham
By the word "liberty" they meant liberty for property, not liberty for persons. View quote
Lewis H. Lapham
The supply of government exceeds demand. View quote
Lewis H. Lapham
I never can pass by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without thinking of it not as a gallery of living portraits but as a cemetery of tax-deductible wealth. View quote
Lewis H. Lapham
If a foreign country doesn't look like a middle-class suburb of Dallas or Detroit, then obviously the natives must be dangerous as well as badly dressed. View quote
Lewis H. Lapham
Power broken into a thousand pieces can be hidden and disowned. If no individual or institution possesses the authority to act without of everybody else in the room, then nobody is at fault if anything goes wrong. View quote
Lewis H. Lapham
Good intentions, like mother's milk, are a perishable commodity. As wealth accumulates, men decay, and sooner or later an aristocracy that once might have aspired to an ideal of wisdom and virtue goes rancid in the sun, becomes an oligarchy distinguished by a character that Aristotle likened to that of "the prosperous fool”-its members so besotted by their faith in money that "they therefore imagine there is nothing that it cannot buy.”. View quote
Lewis H. Lapham
Money ennobles rich people, and corrupts poor people. Money in sufficient quantity entitles its possessor to the reverence and respect owed to the statue of George Washington. Money is the sacred elephant, always in the room, never to be addressed or seen, but whose will is done on earth as it is in Heaven. View quote
Lewis H. Lapham