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Money ennobles rich people, and corrupts poor people. Money in sufficient quantity entitles its possessor to the reverence and respect owed to the statue of George Washington. Money is the sacred elephant, always in the room, never to be addressed or seen, but whose will is done on earth as it is in Heaven.

— Lewis H. Lapham

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Source: Why Is The Pursuit of Money Such an American Obsession? Lewis Lapham talks about his decades chronicling the dysfunctional social mores of the American ruling class. Current Affairs, 11 December 2021
Source quality: Precise citation Points to a specific work with a page, chapter, date or similar locator, so you can look it up.

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More quotes by Lewis H. Lapham

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

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The substitution of meaning accounts for the grasping of misers as well as the extravagance of spendthrifts. Karl Marx well understood this peculiar transformation of flesh into coin.

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The world goes on as before, and it turns out that nobody else seems to to notice the unbearable lightness of being.

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We are a people captivated by the power and romance of metaphor, forever seeking the invisible through the image of the visible.

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Unlike every other other nation in the world, the United States defines itself as a hypothesis and constitutes itself as an argument.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Lewis H. Lapham (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.