The mystical nature of American consumption accounts for its joylessness. We spend a great deal of time in … - Lewis H. Lapham

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The evolutionists seem to know everything about the missing link except the fact that it is missing.

Lewis H. Lapham

The mystical nature of American consumption accounts for its joylessness. We spend a great deal of time in stores, but if we don't seem to take much pleasure in our buying, it's because we're engaged in the acts of sacrifice and self-definition. Abashed in the presence of expensive merchandise, we recognize ourselves. . . as suppliants admitted to a shrine.

Abashed, Accounts, Pleasure, Sacrifice, Self, Shrines

Same Author Quotes

Leadership consists not in degrees of technique but in traits of character.

Character, Degrees, Leadership, Technique

Talk about the flag or drugs or crime (never about race or class or justice) and follow the yellow brick road to the wonderful land of consensus. In place of honest argument among consenting adults the politicians substitute a lullaby for frightened children: the pretense that conflict doesn't really exist, that we have achieved the blessed state in which we no longer need politics.

Blessed, Children, Class, Crime, Politicians, State

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.

Business, Football, People, Presumes, Society, Violence

America is about class. To pretend that it isn't is very ignorant. No society has ever existed without some kind of a ruling class.

America, Class, Ignorant, Kind, Ruling, Society

It isn't money itself that causes the trouble, but the use of money as votive offering and pagan ornament.

Offering, Ornament, Ornaments, Pagan, Use