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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
Become
Pursue
Without
Standards
Kind
Possible
People
American
Purpose
Common
Wish
Text
History
Standard

More quotes by 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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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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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.
Lewis H. Lapham
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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
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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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Wars might come and go, but the seven o'clock news lives forever.
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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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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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
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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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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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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
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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.
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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The rich, like well brought up children, are meant to be seen, not heard.
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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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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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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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