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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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Lewis H. Lapham
Age: 89
Born: 1935
Born: January 8
Journalist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Lewis Henry Lapham
Lewis Lapham
Long
Rivers
Constitute
Resources
Mississippi
Ignorance
Resource
Society
Consumer
American
Reserves
Natural
River
Lost
Consumers
Buffalo
Country
Precious
Herds

More quotes by Lewis H. Lapham

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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.
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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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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.
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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?
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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
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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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Dissent is what rescues democracy from a quiet death behind closed doors.
Lewis H. Lapham
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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.
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Recollections of early childhood bear comparison to fairy tales, and ... youth remains an unknown country to whose bourn no traveler returns except as the agent of a foreign power.
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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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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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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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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The supply of government exceeds demand.
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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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.
Lewis H. Lapham
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Power broken into a thousand pieces can be hidden and disowned.
Lewis H. Lapham
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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
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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 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