Lewis H. Lapham Quotes - Page 3

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Power broken into a thousand pieces can be hidden and disowned.

Lewis H. Lapham

Broken, Pieces, Thousand

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

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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The American press is, and always has been, a booster press, its editorial pages characteristically advancing the same arguments as the paid advertising copy.

Lewis H. Lapham

Media, Pages, Advertising

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

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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.

Lewis H. Lapham

Dream, Way, Invisible

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

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Wars might come and go, but the seven o'clock news lives forever.

Lewis H. Lapham

War, Forever, News

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

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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.

Lewis H. Lapham

Lovely, Looks, Stories

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From authors whom I read more than once I learn to value the weight of words and to delight in their meter and cadence -- in Gibbon's polyphonic counterpoint and Guedalla's command of the subjunctive, in Mailer's hyperbole and Dillard's similes, in Twain's invectives and burlesques with which he set the torch of his ferocious wit to the hospitality tents of the world's colossal humbug . . . 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, Torches

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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.

Lewis H. Lapham

Innocence, Banquets, Endure

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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I begin to understand that failure is its own reward. It is in the effort to close the distance between the work imagined and the work achieved wherein it is to be found that the ceaseless labor is the freedom of play, that what’s at stake isn’t a reflection in the mirror of fame but the escape from the prison of the self.

Lewis H. Lapham

Distance, Reflection, Mirrors

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

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