Lewis H. Lapham

“War is easier than peace. The government elects to punish an enemy it perceives as weak because it is easier to send an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf than to attempt the harder task of making American society not so wretchedly defaced by its hungry children, its crowded prisons, and its corporate thieves....”

“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.”

“A society that presumes a norm of violence and celebrates aggression, whether in the subway, on the football field, or in the conduct of its business, cannot help making celebrities of the people who would destroy it.”

“Unlike any other business in the United States, sports must preserve an illusion of perfect innocence.”

“Of what does politics consist except the making of imperfect decisions, many of them unjust and quite a few of them deadly?”

“As many as six out of ten American adults have never read a book of any kind, and the bulletins from the nation’s educational frontiers read like the casualty reports from a lost war.”

“The supply of government exceeds demand.”

“If a foreign country doesn't look like a middle-class suburb of Dallas or Detroit, then obviously the natives must be dangerous as well as badly dressed.”

“I never can pass by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without thinking of it not as a gallery of living portraits but as a cemetery of tax-deductible wealth.”

“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.”

“People may expect too much of journalism. Not only do they expect it to be entertaining, they expect it to be true.”