Lewis H. Lapham Quotes

Things are done according to money these days.

Money is the great power today. Men sell their souls for it. Women sell their bodies for it. Others worship it. The money power has grown so great that the issue of all issues is whether the corporation shall rule this country or the country shall again rule the corporations.

Money speaks sense in a language all nations understand.

Money: power at its most liquid.

The power which money gives is that of brute force; it is the power of the bludgeon and the bayonet.

Those who have lobbyists are more likely to get what they want …. Those who have more money [to spend on lobbying] are more likely to prevail.

Money plays the largest part in determining the course of history.

Money speaks in Utah.

I have always looked at the world through the prism of money to some degree. If you could follow the money, it explains a lot of things, in all sorts of aspects of the world. You can look at politics through the prism of money. You can look at art through the prism of money. You can look at sports through the prism of money.

If you want to understand why something is happening in America just follow the money.

Politics, war, marriage, crime, adultery. Everything that exists in the world has something to do with money.

Money is power, money is force, money will do good as harm. In the hands of good men and women it could accomplish, and it has accomplished, good.

To money, the finest linguist in the world!

Money is not good or evil. It has no morals or intentions on its own. Money reflects the character of the user.

Money is a singular thing. It ranks with love as man's greatest source of joy. And with death as his greatest source of anxiety. Over all history it has oppressed nearly all people in one of two ways: either it has been abundant and very unreliable, or reliable and very scarce.

Capitalism, though it may not always give the scientific worker a living wage, will always protect him, as being one of the geese which produce golden eggs for its table.

That dreams have power only over your own mind. But with money you can have power over the minds of others

Even genius is tied to profit.

Pound notes are the best religion in the world.

Nothing is so secure as that money will not defeat it.

The almighty dollar, that great object of universal devotion.

I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.

The paid wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the incessant expansions of our population and arts, enchants the eyes of all the rest; the luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the farm, the school, the church, the house, and the very body and feature of man.

Under the rules of a society that cannot distinguish between profit and profiteering, between money defined as necessity and money defined as luxury, murder is occasionally obligatory and always permissible.

A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men who, even if their action be honest and intended for the public interest, are necessarily concentrated upon the great undertakings in which their own money is involved and who necessarily, by very reason of their own limitations, chill and check and destroy genuine economic freedom.