Quotes from Lewis H. Lapham

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

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

The supply of government exceeds demand.

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.

The supply of government exceeds the demand.

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.

History is not what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago; it's a story about what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago.

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?

Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past.

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

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.

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

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.

Leadership consists not in degrees of technique but in traits of character.

America is about class. To pretend that it isn't is very ignorant. No society has ever existed without some kind of a ruling class.

Anti-utopianism continues to suffuse our culture...Today few imagine that society can be fundamentally improved, and those who do are seen as at best deluded, at worst threatening.

[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.

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

The survival of American democracy depends less on the size of its armies than on the capacity of its individual citizens to rely... on the strength of their own thought.

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.

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

People may expect too much of journalism. Not only do they expect it to be entertaining, they expect it to be true.

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

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.