Lewis H. Lapham
Lewis H. Lapham
Lewis Henry Laphamis an American writer. He was the editor of the American monthly Harper's Magazine from 1976 until 1981, and from 1983 until 2006. He is the founder of Lapham's Quarterly, a quarterly publication about history and literature, and has written numerous books on politics and current affairs...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEditor
Date of Birth8 January 1935
CountryUnited States of America
years years-ago stories
History is not what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago; it's a story about what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago.
wise blessing water-of-life
If in the well and truly made martini DeVoto finds "water of life" and the blessing to the spirit, so also DeVoto's The Hour brings to its readers the breath of life and a vision of themselves made generous, indomitable and wise.
book diaries letters
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.
japan people germany
The American oligarchy increasingly has less in common with the American people than it does with the equivalent oligarchies in Germany or Mexico or Japan.
suits-you suits ifs
If you wear a suit, you can talk to anybody.
paper canvas empty
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
mean government television
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.
blue self civilization
Further strengthenings of the self-centered instinct for survival recruit even greater numbers of people into some sort of ring of fellowship (church or gender, red state or blue) by populating the terra incognita outside the ring with enough barbarians to verify the existence of a civilization within--to define the preferred stock by what, as all good people agree, it decidedly is not.
media pages advertising
The American press is, and always has been, a booster press, its editorial pages characteristically advancing the same arguments as the paid advertising copy.
causes birth leading-causes
The leading cause of death is birth.
distance reflection self
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.
self torches delight
From authors whom I read more than once I learn to value the weight of words and to delight in their meter and cadence -- in Gibbon's polyphonic counterpoint and Guedalla's command of the subjunctive, in Mailer's hyperbole and Dillard's similes, in Twain's invectives and burlesques with which he set the torch of his ferocious wit to the hospitality tents of the world's colossal humbug . . . 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.
mean past weapons
Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past.
war educational book
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.