Quote

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

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Lewis H. Lapham
Age: 89
Born: 1935
Born: January 8
Journalist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Lewis Henry Lapham
Lewis Lapham
Cannot
Innate
Fireplaces
Anything
Temperament
Dens
Suspicion
Stuffed
Contemplation
Contemplative
Arise
Framed
National
Counted
Philistinism
Fire
Arises
Fireplace
Less
Distrust
Mounted

More quotes by Lewis H. Lapham

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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
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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.
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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
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The American press is, and always has been, a booster press, its editorial pages characteristically advancing the same arguments as the paid advertising copy.
Lewis H. Lapham
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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
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The rich, like well brought up children, are meant to be seen, not heard.
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Democracy is born in dirt, nourished by the digging up and turning over as much of it as can be brought within reach of a television camera or subpoena.
Lewis H. Lapham
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In the garden of tabloid delight, there is always a clean towel and another song.
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Dissent is what rescues democracy from a quiet death behind closed doors.
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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
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Power broken into a thousand pieces can be hidden and disowned.
Lewis H. Lapham
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It isn't money itself that causes the trouble, but the use of money as votive offering and pagan ornament.
Lewis H. Lapham
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Under the rules of a society that cannot distinguish between profit and profiteering, between money defined as necessity and money defined as luxury, murder is occasionally obligatory and always permissible.
Lewis H. Lapham
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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
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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
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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
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I begin to understand that failure is its own reward. It is in the effort to close the distance between the work imagined and the work achieved wherein it is to be found that the ceaseless labor is the freedom of play, that what’s at stake isn’t a reflection in the mirror of fame but the escape from the prison of the self.
Lewis H. Lapham
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[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
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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
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Leadership consists not in degrees of technique but in traits of character.
Lewis H. Lapham