Lewis H. Lapham Quotes - Page 2

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• Usually when I drank too much, I could guess why I did so, the objective being to murder a state of consciousness that I didn't have the courage to sustain--a fear of heights, which sometimes during the carnival of the 1960s accompanied my attempts to transform the bourgeois journalist into an avant-garde novelist. The stepped-up ambition was a commonplace among the would-be William Faulkners of my generation; nearly always it resulted in commercial failure and literary embarrassment.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Ambition, Height, Too Much

  "The war on drugs and alcohol is a war against human nature" by Lewis Lapham, www.theguardian.com. December 10, 2012.

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• 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.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Art, New York, Thinking

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

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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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• The American oligarchy increasingly has less in common with the American people than it does with the equivalent oligarchies in Germany or Mexico or Japan.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Japan, People, Doe

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• If you wear a suit, you can talk to anybody.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Suits You, Suits, Ifs

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• 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 the substance of their people, for insurance companies to cheat the young and rob the old.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Children, Pain, War

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• 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 accounts for the immense wealth of American sports. It is the ceremony of innocence that the fans pay to see - not the game or the match or the bout, but the ritual portrayal of a world in which time stops and all hope remains plausible, in which everybody present can recover the blameless expectations of a child, where the forces of light always triumph over the powers of darkness.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Sports, Business, Children

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• What joins the Americans one to another is not a common ancestry, language or race, but a shared work of the imagination that looks forward to the making of a future, not backward to the insignia of the past. Their enterprise is underwritten by a Constitution that allows for the widest horizons of sight and the broadest range of expression, supports the liberties of the people as opposed to the ambitions of the state, and stands as premise for a narrative rather than plan for an invasion or a monument. The narrative was always plural; not one story, many stories.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Ambition, Past, Race

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• The playing field is more sacred than the stock exchange, more blessed than Capital Hill or the vaults of Fort Knox. The diamond and the gridiron -- and, to a lesser degree, the court, the rink, the track, and the ring -- embody the American dream of Eden.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Dream, Blessed, Eden

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

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• Tardiness is next to wickedness in a society relentless in its consumption of time as both a good and a service--as tweet and Instagram, film clip and sound bite, as sporting event, investment opportunity, Tinder hookup, and interest rate--its value measured not by its texture or its substance but by the speed of its delivery, a distinction apparent to Andy Warhol when he supposedly said that any painting that takes longer than five minutes to make is a bad painting.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Opportunity, Substance, Texture

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• 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 have committed or how cynically he may have debased his talent or his friends, variations on the answer Yes, but I did it for the money, satisfy all but the most tiresome objections.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Money, Men, Decay

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

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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?

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Opposites, Sides, Ends

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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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• 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 fellow who, by definition, can ill afford to believe in anything other than the doctrine of the bottom line. Deprive a capitalist of his God-given right to lie and cheat and steal, and the poor sap stands a better than even chance of becoming one of the abominable wards of the state from whose grimy fingers the Reagan Administration hopes to snatch the ark of democracy.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  War, Lying, Believe

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• 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 occasionally obligatory and always permissible.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Money, Luxury, Murder

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

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• Love of country follows from the exercise of its freedoms, not from pride in its fleets or its armies.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Country, Freedom, Pride

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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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• As many as six out of ten American adults have never read a book of any kind, and the bulletins from the nation’s educational frontiers read like the casualty reports from a lost war.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  War, Educational, Book

  Lewis H. Lapham (2004). “Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy”, p.121, Penguin

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• We are a people captivated by the power and romance of metaphor, forever seeking the invisible through the image of the visible.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  People, Romance, Forever

  "Waiting For The Barbarians" by Lewis H. Lapham, (p. 88), 1997.

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• Recollections of early childhood bear comparison to fairy tales, and ... youth remains an unknown country to whose bourn no traveler returns except as the agent of a foreign power.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Country, Childhood, Agents

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• In the garden of tabloid delight, there is always a clean towel and another song.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Song, Garden, Delight

  Lewis H. Lapham (1997). “Waiting for the Barbarians”, p.195, Verso

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• Most American cities shop to their best advantage when seen from a height or from a distance, at a point where the ugliness of the buildings dissolves into the beauty of an abstraction.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Distance, Cities, America

  "Money And Class In America: Notes And Observations On Our Civil Religion" by Lewis H. Lapham, (Chapter 3, The Golden Horde, p. 58), 1989.

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• Seeing is believing, and if an American success is to count for anything in the world it must be clothed in the raiment of property. As often as not it isn't the money itself that means anything; it is the use of money as the currency of the soul.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Money, Believe, Mean

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

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• I sometimes think that the American story is the one about the reading of the will.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Reading, Thinking, America

  "Money And Class In America: Notes And Observations On Our Civil Religion" by Lewis H. Lapham, (Chapter 2, Protocols of Wealth, p. 56), 1989.

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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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