Quotes by Lewis Lapham

It isn’t with magic that men make their immortality; they do so with what on the long journey across the frontiers of three millennia they can salvage from the death of cities and the wreck of empires, reconfiguring the record left to them in the form of casualty reports and quadratic equations, on ships’ logs and bronze coins, as epic poems and totem poles and painted ceilings, in confessions voluntary and coerced, as proclamations, prophecies, and prayers, in five-act plays and three-part songs.

Democracy is born in dirt, nourished by the digging up and turning over as much of it as can be brought within reach of a television camera or subpoena.