Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
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
Empty
Paper
Courage
Future
Sheet
Thought
Sheets
Make
Canvas
Blank
Observation
More quotes by Lewis H. Lapham
Power broken into a thousand pieces can be hidden and disowned.
Lewis H. Lapham
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.
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 rich, like well brought up children, are meant to be seen, not heard.
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
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
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
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
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
The state of perpetual emptiness is, of course, very good for business.
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
In the garden of tabloid delight, there is always a clean towel and another song.
Lewis H. Lapham
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
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
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
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
It isn't money itself that causes the trouble, but the use of money as votive offering and pagan ornament.
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
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
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