Quote

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

Lewis H. Lapham

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Lewis H. Lapham
Age: 89
Born: 1935
Born: January 8
Journalist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Lewis Henry Lapham
Lewis Lapham
Consists
Technique
Degrees
Leadership
Character
Restraint
Traits
Followers

More quotes by Lewis H. Lapham

Image
The rich, like well brought up children, are meant to be seen, not heard.
Lewis H. Lapham
Image
The figure of the enthusiast who has just discovered jogging or a new way to fix tofu can be said to stand or, more accurately, to tremble on the threshold of conversion, as the representative American
Lewis H. Lapham
Image
Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what's good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.
Lewis H. Lapham
Image
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
Image
To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.
Lewis H. Lapham
Image
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
Image
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.
Lewis H. Lapham
Image
A society that presumes a norm of violence and celebrates aggression, whether in the subway, on the football field, or in the conduct of its business, cannot help making celebrities of the people who would destroy it.
Lewis H. Lapham
Image
Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past.
Lewis H. Lapham
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words.
Lewis H. Lapham
Image
The state of perpetual emptiness is, of course, very good for business.
Lewis H. Lapham
Image
Now that Mr. Carter has made a book of his diary, an adoring memoir entitled Keeping Faith, the notes read like a collection of letters sent from scout camp.
Lewis H. Lapham
Image
Wars might come and go, but the seven o'clock news lives forever.
Lewis H. Lapham
Image
[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.
Lewis H. Lapham
Image
Except in a few well-publicized instances (enough to lend credence to the iconography painted on the walls of the media), the rigorous practice of rugged individualism usually leads to poverty, ostracism and disgrace. The rugged individualist is too often mistaken for the misfit, the maverick, the spoilsport, the sore thumb.
Lewis H. Lapham
Image
Youth as glimpsed by its elders is a story that comes from afar, showing itself as either lovely to look at or a torment to endure.
Lewis H. Lapham
Image
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
Image
The future is an empty canvas or a blank sheet of paper, and if you have the courage of your own thought and your own observation you can make of it what you will
Lewis H. Lapham