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Lewis H. Lapham Quotes (1935-2024)
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About Lewis H. Lapham
Lewis Henry Lapham (January 8, 1935 β July 23, 2024) was an American writer. He was the editor of the American monthly Harper's Magazine from 1976 until 1981, and from 1983 until 2006. He also was the founder of the eponymous publication about history and literature entitled Lapham's Quarterly.
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βWars might come and go, but the seven o'clock news lives forever.β
βI sometimes think that the American story is the one about the reading of the will.β
βThe world goes on as before, and it turns out that nobody else seems to to notice the unbearable lightness of being.β
βWe are a people captivated by the power and romance of metaphor, forever seeking the invisible through the image of the visible.β
βSeeking the invisible through the imagery of the visible, the Americans never can get quite all the way to the end of the American dream.β
βBut I had forgotten about the seven bowls of God's wrath stored in the minds of some of the unhappier prophets on the reactionary right,...β
βUnlike every other other nation in the world, the United States defines itself as a hypothesis and constitutes itself as an argument.β
βNobody wants to say, at least not for publication, that we live in a society that cares as much about the humanities as it cares about the color of the rain in Tashkent.β
βAt 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.β
βWhat 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?β
βMost American cities shop to their best advantage when seen from a height or from a distance, at a point where the ugliness of the buildings dissolves into the beauty of an abstraction.β
βLet 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.β
βWe 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.β
βThe 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. β
βSince the eighteenth century the immense expansion of the worlds wealth has come about as a result of a correspondingly immense expansion of credit, which in turn has demanded increasingly stupendous suspensions of disbelief.β
βPower 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.β
βSurely they knew that the very idea of the future came in an American box - complete with instructions for assembling a Constitution, a MacDonald's hamburger franchise, a row of Marriot hotels and a First Amendment. β
Quotes About Lewis H. Lapham
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Sara E. Melzer, Book Review: An American Versaille: THE WISH FOR KINGS: Democracy at Bay, By Lewis H. Lapham, on Lewis H. Lapham
βHe argues that although we are theoretically a democracy, which should empower the majority, in practice, an elite has taken over, βa government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich.β ... Lapham argues that contemporary Washington looks surprisingly like the court of the Sun King of Absolutist France where the courtiersβ whole worth is measured by where one gets to sit or stand or by the bow with which one greets or is greeted. Officials in the court of 20th-Century America are obsessed with equivalent hierarchical distinctions. Who gets to ride in the secretaryβs limousine? Who will occupy the office overlooking the lawn? These are the questions our officials really care about, although they hide their petty, narcissistic impulses behind socially correct rhetoric about the peopleβs welfare... Lapham tries to jolt us out of our stupor. He urges us to act and become engaged in the world to reclaim the democratic values that define the best of what we are and can be. ... In Laphamβs most probing chapter... he argues that although we think we want democracy, deep-down we really want kings--or the illusion of kings, or any kind of authoritative being.β
About Lewis H. Lapham
Lewis Henry Lapham (January 8, 1935 β July 23, 2024) was an American writer. He was the editor of the American monthly Harper's Magazine from 1976 until 1981, and from 1983 until 2006. He also was the founder of the eponymous publication about history and literature entitled Lapham's Quarterly.