Lewis H. Lapham Quotes - Page 3

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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 can dance around it as if it were the incarnation of a god. Money votes socialist or monarchist, finds a profit in pornography or translations from the Bible, commissions Rembrandt and underwrites the technology of Auschwitz. It acquires its meaning from the uses to which it is put.

Lewis H. Lapham

Money, Men, Technology

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The days of my youth I remember as nearly always in need of explanation, and not as much fun as advertised in the promotions for board games and breakfast cereal.

Lewis H. Lapham

Fun, Cereal, Games

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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.

Lewis H. Lapham

Leader, Gentleman, Luck

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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.

Lewis H. Lapham

Opportunity, United States, Done

"Money And Class In America: Notes And Observations On Our Civil Religion" by Lewis H. Lapham, (Chapter 7, Descent Into The Mirror, p. 190), 1989.

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Democracy is born in dirt, nourished by the digging up and turning over as much of it as can be brought within reach of a television camera or subpoena.

Lewis H. Lapham

Democracy, Cameras, Digging

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The practice of our democracy depends on a sense of, and knowledge of, history in the same way that playing in the World Series requires a bat and a ball.

Lewis H. Lapham

Practice, Democracy, Bats

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The substitution of meaning accounts for the grasping of misers as well as the extravagance of spendthrifts. Karl Marx well understood this peculiar transformation of flesh into coin.

Lewis H. Lapham

Flesh, Peculiar, Extravagance

"Money And Class In America: Notes And Observations On Our Civil Religion" by Lewis H. Lapham, (Chapter 8, Holy Dread, p. 211), 1989.

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As a child growing up in the precincts of wealth, and later as a college student, newspaper reporter and resident of New York's Upper East Side, I got used to listening to the talk of financial killings and sexual misalliance that animates the conversation of the rich and the familiars of the rich.

Lewis H. Lapham

New York, Growing Up, Children

Lewis H. Lapham (1989). “Money and Class in America: Notes and Observations on the Civil Religion”

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But the line of thought that I'd been chasing for several days was implicit in the ruins of the old Roman Empire, which gradually destroyed itself by substituting the faith in a legion of miraculous words for the strength of armies and the weight of walls.

Lewis H. Lapham

Wall, Army, Ruins

Lewis H. Lapham (1997). “Waiting for the Barbarians”, p.186, Verso

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We need not seek our own best selves, and in the meantime we inoculate ourselves against the viruses of age and idealism, which, as the advertising agencies well know, depress sales and sour the feasts of consumption.

Lewis H. Lapham

Depressing, Agency, Self

"Waiting For The Barbarians" by Lewis H. Lapham, (p. 197), 1997.

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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.

Lewis H. Lapham

Broken, Faults, Anything Goes

Lewis H. Lapham (1997). “Waiting for the Barbarians”, p.75, Verso

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If in the well and truly made martini DeVoto finds "water of life" and the blessing to the spirit, so also DeVoto's The Hour brings to its readers the breath of life and a vision of themselves made generous, indomitable and wise.

Lewis H. Lapham

Wise, Blessing, Water Of Life

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[For American consumer society], the country's reserves of ignorance constitute a natural resource as precious as the Mississippi River or the long-lost herds of buffalo.

Lewis H. Lapham

Country, Ignorance, Rivers

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Since the eighteenth century the immense expansion of the worlds wealth has come about as a result of a correspondingly immense expansion of credit, which in turn has demanded increasingly stupendous suspensions of disbelief.

Lewis H. Lapham

Expansion, Credit, World

"Money And Class In America: Notes And Observations On Our Civil Religion" by Lewis H. Lapham, (Chapter 8, Holy Dread, p. 197-198), 1989.

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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.

Lewis H. Lapham

Book, Diaries, Letters

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His administration apparently means to define itself as a television program instead of a government...I don't know if it can please both its sponsors and its intended audience.

Lewis H. Lapham

Mean, Government, Television

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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 man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.

Lewis H. Lapham

Country, Men, Nbc

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What kind of people do we wish to become, and how do we know an American when we see one? Is it possible to pursue a common purpose without a common history or a standard text?

Lewis H. Lapham

Common Purpose, People, Wish

Lewis H. Lapham (1997). “Waiting for the Barbarians”, p.31, Verso

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The mystical nature of American consumption accounts for its joylessness. We spend a great deal of time in stores, but if we don't seem to take much pleasure in our buying, it's because we're engaged in the acts of sacrifice and self-definition. Abashed in the presence of expensive merchandise, we recognize ourselves . . . as suppliants admitted to a shrine.

Lewis H. Lapham

Sacrifice, Self, Shrines

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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.

Lewis H. Lapham

Light, Fire, Vanity

Lewis H. Lapham (1989). “Money and Class in America: Notes and Observations on the Civil Religion”

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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 or mounted over the fireplace in the den.

Lewis H. Lapham

Fire, Framed, Contemplation

Lewis H. Lapham (1989). “Money and Class in America: Notes and Observations on the Civil Religion”

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Unlike any other business in the United States, sports must preserve an illusion of perfect innocence.

Lewis H. Lapham

Sports, Perfect, United States

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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 individualism usually leads to poverty, ostracism and disgrace. The rugged individualist is too often mistaken for the misfit, the maverick, the spoilsport, the sore thumb.

Lewis H. Lapham

Wall, Pain, Media

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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.

Lewis H. Lapham

Self, Mazes, Way

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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 and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.

Lewis H. Lapham

Passion, Black, One Day

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Born: January 8, 1935
Occupation: Writer
Cite this Page: Citation

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