Lapham Quotes

“Again in combination with the schools, the nation's media reflect the character of society impressed by the displays of power and opulence rather than the play of mind. The ancient Greeks admired in their art what they called the glittering play of "windswift thought." Pericles in his funeral oration boasted not of the weapons or statues collected in Athens, although these were many and beautiful, but of the character of the Athenian citizen--self-reliant, resourceful, public-spirited, loyal, skeptical, marked "by refinement without extravagance and knowledge without effeminacy.”
― Lewis Lapham

“Typographic Man wrote the Constitution and the Gettysburg Address. Graphic Man elects the president of the United States. Which of the Ancient Greek forms of government will satisfy and serve the interest of both the former and the latter is a question beyond the boundaries of this book. The preliminary working toward an answer is the recognition that a nation denied knowledge of its past cannot make sense of its present or imagine its future. Human beings deprived of memory lose track of where they’ve been, who they are, and where they might be going: so do the people’s elected representatives, who forget why sovereign nations go to war or how it comes to pass that money doesn’t grow on trees.”
― Lewis Lapham