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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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Lewis H. Lapham
Age: 89
Born: 1935
Born: January 8
Journalist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Lewis Henry Lapham
Lewis Lapham
Constitution
Gentlemen
Ignorance
Suspicious
Democracy
Associated
Government
Urban
Efficient
Gentleman
Unruly
Folly
Turbulence
Wrote
Wary
More quotes by Lewis H. Lapham
Dissent is what rescues democracy from a quiet death behind closed doors.
Lewis H. Lapham
Power broken into a thousand pieces can be hidden and disowned.
Lewis H. Lapham
The supply of government exceeds demand.
Lewis H. Lapham
The state of perpetual emptiness is, of course, very good for business.
Lewis H. Lapham
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past.
Lewis H. Lapham
His administration apparently means to define itself as a television program instead of a government...I don't know if it can please both its sponsors and its intended audience.
Lewis H. Lapham
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.
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
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
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.
Lewis H. Lapham
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
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 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
