Quote

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

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
Dream
Ends
Imagery
Way
Visible
Never
Invisible
Seeking
Americans
Quite
American

More quotes by 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
Love of country follows from the exercise of its freedoms, not from pride in its fleets or its armies.
Lewis H. Lapham
Image
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.
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 supply of government exceeds demand.
Lewis H. Lapham
Image
Wars might come and go, but the seven o'clock news lives forever.
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
Leadership consists not in degrees of technique but in traits of character it requires moral rather than athletic or intellectual effort, and it imposes on both leader and follower alike the burdens of self-restraint.
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
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
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
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
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
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
Image
The rich, like well brought up children, are meant to be seen, not heard.
Lewis H. Lapham
Image
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
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
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
[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
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