Quote

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

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
Discovered
Tofu
Enthusiasm
Jogging
Figure
Tremble
Figures
Accurately
Stand
Representative
American
Threshold
Way
Conversion
Representatives
Enthusiast

More quotes by Lewis H. Lapham

Image
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.
Lewis H. Lapham
Image
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
Image
The supply of government exceeds demand.
Lewis H. Lapham
Image
Label celebrity a consumer society's most precious consumer product, and eventually it becomes the hero with a thousand faces, the packaging of the society's art and politics, the framework of its commerce, and the stuff of its religion.
Lewis H. Lapham
Image
Dissent is what rescues democracy from a quiet death behind closed doors.
Lewis H. Lapham
Image
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.
Lewis H. Lapham
Image
The national distrust of the contemplative temperament arises less from an innate Philistinism than from a suspicion of anything that cannot be counted, stuffed, framed or mounted over the fireplace in the den.
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 rich, like well brought up children, are meant to be seen, not heard.
Lewis H. Lapham
Image
Leadership consists not in degrees of technique but in traits of character.
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
In the garden of tabloid delight, there is always a clean towel and another song.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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