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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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Lewis H. Lapham
Age: 89
Born: 1935
Born: January 8
Journalist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Lewis Henry Lapham
Lewis Lapham
Trouble
Causes
Use
Money
Ornament
Ornaments
Pagan
Offering

More quotes by Lewis H. Lapham

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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
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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
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The supply of government exceeds demand.
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In the garden of tabloid delight, there is always a clean towel and another song.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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?
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Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past.
Lewis H. Lapham
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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
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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.
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More than illness or death, the American journalist fears standing alone against the whim of his owners or the prejudices of his audience. Deprive William Safire of the insignia of the New York Times, and he would have a hard time selling his truths to a weekly broadsheet in suburban Duluth.
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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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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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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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.
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The future is an empty canvas or a blank sheet of paper, and if you have the courage of your own thought and your own observation you can make of it what you will
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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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