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Power broken into a thousand pieces can be hidden and disowned.

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
Disowned
Hidden
Broken
Thousand
Pieces
Power

More quotes by Lewis H. Lapham

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Power broken into a thousand pieces can be hidden and disowned. If no individual or institution possesses the authority to act without of everybody else in the room, then nobody is at fault if anything goes wrong.
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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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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The rich, like well brought up children, are meant to be seen, not heard.
Lewis H. Lapham
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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
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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
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The days of my youth I remember as nearly always in need of explanation, and not as much fun as advertised in the promotions for board games and breakfast cereal.
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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Leadership consists not in degrees of technique but in traits of character.
Lewis H. Lapham
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The more prosperous and settled a nation, the more readily it tends to think of war as a regrettable accident to nations less fortunate the chance of war presents itself as a possible bountiful friend.
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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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
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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
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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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Love of country follows from the exercise of its freedoms, not from pride in its fleets or its armies.
Lewis H. Lapham
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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
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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
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History is not what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago it's a story about what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago.
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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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