Quote

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

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
Future
History
Means
Ends
Construed
Past
Weapon
Mean
Defend
Weapons
Instead

More quotes by Lewis H. Lapham

Image
Seeking the invisible through the imagery of the visible, the Americans never can get quite all the way to the end of the American dream.
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
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
People may expect too much of journalism. Not only do they expect it to be entertaining, they expect it to be true.
Lewis H. Lapham
Image
Power broken into a thousand pieces can be hidden and disowned.
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
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
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
Love of country follows from the exercise of its freedoms, not from pride in its fleets or its armies.
Lewis H. Lapham
Image
The state of perpetual emptiness is, of course, very good for business.
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
It isn't money itself that causes the trouble, but the use of money as votive offering and pagan ornament.
Lewis H. Lapham
Image
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.
Lewis H. Lapham
Image
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
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
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
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
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
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