Lewis H. Lapham Quotes

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

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?

That’s what’s remarkable about our current circumstances: the poverty of our imagination. We haven’t had a new political idea in 50 years. And the reason is that we talk about money, instead of about ideas, or feeling or emotion. Reading this book Dawn of Everything gives me reason to feel that men at one time had the imagination to create a future fit for human beings, instead of a future fit for machines, which is what we’ve got going now. I mean, the belief in money, like the belief in technology, in and of itself, is a revolution in the direction of the world made by and for machines. We have to figure out a way to make a future fit for human beings. And that is the problem that we’re confronting at the moment. And the more that we look for the answer in money, the less likely we are to find it.

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

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.

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.

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

Happily, at least for the moment, the society is rich enough to afford the staging of the fiction of democracy as a means of quieting the suspicions of a potentially riotous mob with the telling of a fairy tale. The rising cost of the production — the pointless nominating conventions decorated with 15,000 journalists as backdrop for the 150,000 balloons - reflects the ever-increasing rarity of the demonstrable fact. The country is being asked to vote in November for television commercials because only in the fanciful time-zone of a television commercial can the American democracy still be said to exist.

His purpose is therapeutic. A man at play with the freedoms of his mind, believing that it is allegiance to the truth and not the flag that rescues the citizens of a democracy from the prisons of their selfishness and greed, Twain aims to blow away with a blast of laughter the pestilent hospitality tents of a society making itself sick with its consumption of “sweet-smelling, sugar-coated lies.”

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.