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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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Lewis H. Lapham
Age: 89
Born: 1935
Born: January 8
Journalist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Lewis Henry Lapham
Lewis Lapham
Needs
Advertising
Viruses
Seek
Sour
Age
Selves
Best
Idealism
Inoculate
Wells
Sales
Feasts
Well
Depressing
Depress
Self
Consumption
Meantime
Need
Agency
Agencies

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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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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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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Dissent is what rescues democracy from a quiet death behind closed doors.
Lewis H. Lapham
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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
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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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In the garden of tabloid delight, there is always a clean towel and another song.
Lewis H. Lapham
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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
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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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The state of perpetual emptiness is, of course, very good for business.
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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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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[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
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I begin to understand that failure is its own reward. It is in the effort to close the distance between the work imagined and the work achieved wherein it is to be found that the ceaseless labor is the freedom of play, that what’s at stake isn’t a reflection in the mirror of fame but the escape from the prison of the self.
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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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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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