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.
Lewis H. LaphamAs many as six out of ten American adults have never read a book of any kind, and the bulletins from the nationโs educational frontiers read like the casualty reports from a lost war.
Lewis H. LaphamMoney is like fire, an element as little troubled by moralizing as earth, air and water. Men can employ it as a tool or they can dance around it as if it were the incarnation of a god. Money votes socialist or monarchist, finds a profit in pornography or translations from the Bible, commissions Rembrandt and underwrites the technology of Auschwitz. It acquires its meaning from the uses to which it is put.
Lewis H. LaphamHistory is not what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago; it's a story about what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago.
Lewis H. Lapham