Lewis H. Lapham quotes

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)
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. View quote
Lewis H. Lapham
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 those same people felt themselves so poor. View quote
Lewis H. Lapham
It isn't money itself that causes the trouble, but the use of money as votive offering and pagan ornament. View quote
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. View quote
Lewis H. Lapham
Unlike every other nation in the world, the United States defines itself as a hypothesis and constitutes itself as an argument. View quote
Lewis H. Lapham
The rich, like well brought up children, are meant to be seen, not heard. View quote
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. View quote
Lewis H. Lapham
The state of perpetual emptiness is, of course, very good for business. View quote
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. View quote
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)
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. View quote
Lewis H. Lapham
I sometimes think that the American story is the one about the reading of the will. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Lewis H. Lapham
The pose of innocence is as mandatory as the ability to eat banquet food and endure the scourging of the press. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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? View quote
Lewis H. Lapham
In the garden of tabloid delight, there is always a clean towel and another song. (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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Lewis H. Lapham