Quotes by Lewis Lapham

• People may expect too much of journalism. Not only do they expect it to be entertaining, they expect it to be true.
• The supply of government exceeds demand.
• Of what does politics consist except the making of imperfect decisions, many of them unjust and quite a few of them deadly?
• 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.
• 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.
• Unlike any other business in the United States, sports must preserve an illusion of perfect innocence.