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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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Lewis H. Lapham
Age: 89
Born: 1935
Born: January 8
Journalist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Lewis Henry Lapham
Lewis Lapham
Text
Wish
Standard
History
Pursue
Become
Without
Standards
Kind
Possible
People
American
Purpose
Common

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Wars might come and go, but the seven o'clock news lives forever.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Dissent is what rescues democracy from a quiet death behind closed doors.
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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.
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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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[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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
Lewis H. Lapham
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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
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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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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.
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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.
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The state of perpetual emptiness is, of course, very good for business.
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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.
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In the garden of tabloid delight, there is always a clean towel and another song.
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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