Lewis H. Lapham Quotes

37 quotes in 936 categories

• Unlike any other business in the United States, sports must preserve an illusion of perfect innocence. The mounting of this illusion defines the purpose and…
• 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…
• We might make a public moan in the newspapers about the decay of conscience, but in private conversation, no matter what crimes a man may…
• The figure of the enthusiast who has just discovered jogging or a new way to fix tofu can be said to stand or, more accurately,…
• Never in the history of the world have so many people been so rich; never in the history of the world have so many of…
• Nobody suffers the pain of birth or the anguish of loving a child in order for presidents to make wars, for governments to feed on…
• 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…
• The supply of government exceeds demand.
• 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…
• 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…
• The genius of capitalism consists precisely in its lack of morality. Unless he is rich enough to hire his own choir, a capitalist is a…
• Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what's good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the…
• Among all the emotions, the rich have the least talent for love. It is possible to love one's dog, dress or duck-shooting hat, but a…
• 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…
• More than illness or death, the American journalist fears standing alone against the whim of his owners or the prejudices of his audience. Deprive William…
• To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion…
• Except in a few well-publicized instances (enough to lend credence to the iconography painted on the walls of the media), the rigorous practice of rugged…
• The national distrust of the contemplative temperament arises less from an innate Philistinism than from a suspicion of anything that cannot be counted, stuffed, framed…
• A certain kind of rich man afflicted with the symptoms of moral dandyism sooner or later comes to the conclusion that it isn't enough merely…
• Under the rules of a society that cannot distinguish between profit and profiteering, between money defined as necessity and money defined as luxury, murder is…

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