Lewis H. Lapham

It isn't money itself that causes the trouble, but the use of money as votive offering and pagan ornament.

— Lewis H. Lapham

Never in the history of the world have so many people been so rich; never in the history off the world have so many of those same people felt themselves so poor.

— 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Nobody wants to say, at least not for publication, that we live in a society that cares as much about the humanities as it cares about the color of the rain in Tashkent.

— Lewis H. Lapham

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

By the word "liberty" they meant liberty for property, not liberty for persons.

— Lewis H. Lapham

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

— Lewis H. Lapham

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

The state of perpetual emptiness is, of course, very good for business.

— Lewis H. Lapham

At this late stage in the history of American capitalism I'm not sure I know how much testimony still needs to be presented to establish the relation between profit and theft.

— Lewis H. Lapham

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

The pose of innocence is as mandatory as the ability to eat banquet food and endure the scourging of the press.

— Lewis H. Lapham

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

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.

— Lewis H. Lapham

The rich, like well brought up children, are meant to be seen, not heard.

— Lewis H. Lapham

The world goes on as before, and it turns out that nobody else seems to to notice the unbearable lightness of being.

— Lewis H. Lapham

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

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

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

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

— Lewis H. Lapham

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

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.

— Lewis H. Lapham

If we could let go of our faith in money, who knows what we might put in its place?

— Lewis H. Lapham

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 to make money. He feels obliged to hold views, to espouse causes and elect Presidents, to explain to a trembling world how and why the world went wrong.

— 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.

— Lewis H. Lapham

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

Unlike every other other nation in the world, the United States defines itself as a hypothesis and constitutes itself as an argument.

— 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.

— Lewis H. Lapham

The gentlemen who wrote the Constitution were as suspicious of efficient government as they were wary of democracy, a "turbulence and a folly" that was associated with the unruly ignorance of an urban mob.

— 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.

— Lewis H. Lapham

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

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,...

— Lewis H. Lapham

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

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

— Lewis H. Lapham

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

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.

— Lewis H. Lapham