Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
At this late stage in the history of American capitalism I'm not sure I know how much testimony still needs to be presented to establish the relation between profit and theft.
Lewis H. Lapham
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Lewis H. Lapham
Age: 89
Born: 1935
Born: January 8
Journalist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Lewis Henry Lapham
Lewis Lapham
Stage
Theft
Sure
Presented
American
Testimony
History
Establish
Stills
Profit
Still
Capitalism
Needs
Relation
Much
Late
More quotes by Lewis H. Lapham
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.
Lewis H. Lapham
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
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
Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past.
Lewis H. Lapham
[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
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
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
Leadership consists not in degrees of technique but in traits of character.
Lewis H. Lapham
Love of country follows from the exercise of its freedoms, not from pride in its fleets or its armies.
Lewis H. Lapham
The supply of government exceeds demand.
Lewis H. Lapham
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
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
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
The state of perpetual emptiness is, of course, very good for business.
Lewis H. Lapham
Power broken into a thousand pieces can be hidden and disowned.
Lewis H. Lapham
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
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
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
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
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
