Christopher Lasch Quotes

Conservatives have no understanding of modern capitalism. They have a distorted understanding of the traditional values they claim to defend... view

By: Christopher Lasch

A child's appetite for new toys appeal to the desire for ownership and appropriation: the appeal of toys comes to lie not in their use but in their status as possessions... view

By: Christopher Lasch

A growing awareness of the depth of popular attachment to the family has led some liberals to concede that family is not just a buzzword for reaction... view

By: Christopher Lasch

A society that has made "nostalgia" a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange quickly repudiates the suggestion that life in the past was in any important way better than life today... view

By: Christopher Lasch

Adherents of the new religious right reject the separation of politics and religion, but they bring no spiritual insights to politics... view

By: Christopher Lasch

The left sees nothing but bigotry and superstition in the popular defense of the family or in popular attitudes regarding abortion, crime, busing, and the school curriculum... view

By: Christopher Lasch

Relentless improvement of the product and upgrading of consumer tastes are the heart of mass merchandising... view

By: Christopher Lasch

The attempt to redefine the family as a purely voluntary arrangement grows out of the modern delusion that people can keep all their options open all the time... view

By: Christopher Lasch

The conservative revival cannot be dismissed... view

By: Christopher Lasch

The family wage has been eroded by the same developments that have promoted consumerism as a way of life... view

By: Christopher Lasch

The intellectual debility of contemporary conservatism is indicated by its silence on all important matters... view

By: Christopher Lasch

The job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information... view

By: Christopher Lasch

The last three decades have seen the collapse of the family wage system... view

By: Christopher Lasch

The left ask people to believe that there is no conflict between feminism and the family... view

By: Christopher Lasch

The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types... view

By: Christopher Lasch

The left has come to regard common sense - the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community - as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment... view

By: Christopher Lasch

The left has lost the common touch... view

By: Christopher Lasch

Propaganda in the ordinary sense of the term plays a less important part in a consumer society, where people greet all official pronouncements with suspicion... view

By: Christopher Lasch

The left no longer stands for common sense, as it did in the days of Tom Paine... view

By: Christopher Lasch

The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction... view

By: Christopher Lasch

The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction... view

By: Christopher Lasch

The news appeals to the same jaded appetite that makes a child tire of a toy as soon as it becomes familiar and demand a new one in its place... view

By: Christopher Lasch

The proper reply to right wing religiosity is not to insist that politics and religion don't mix. This is the stock response of the left... view

By: Christopher Lasch

The question of the family now divides our society so deeply that the opposing sides cannot even agree on a definition of the institution they are arguing about... view

By: Christopher Lasch

The reporting of news has to be understood as propaganda for commodities, and events by images... view

By: Christopher Lasch

The same historical development that turned the citizen into a client transformed the worker from a producer into a consumer... view

By: Christopher Lasch

Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it... view

By: Christopher Lasch

Traditionalists will have to master techniques of sustained activism formerly monopolized by the left... view

By: Christopher Lasch

We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change... view

By: Christopher Lasch

When liberals finally grasped the strength of popular feeling about the family, they cried to appropriate the rhetoric and symbolism of family values for their own purposes... view

By: Christopher Lasch

Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice... view

By: Christopher Lasch

The left has lost touch with popular opinion, thereby making it possible for the right to present itself as the party of common sense... view

By: Christopher Lasch

Information, usually seen as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its by-product... view

By: Christopher Lasch

Because it equates tradition with prejudice, the left finds itself increasingly unable to converse with ordinary people in their common language... view

By: Christopher Lasch

Conservatives sense a link between television and drugs, but they do not grasp the nature of this connection... view

By: Christopher Lasch

Conservatives unwittingly side with the social forces that contribute to the destruction of traditional values... view

By: Christopher Lasch

Drugs are merely the most obvious form of addiction in our society. Drug addiction is one of the things that undermines traditional values... view

By: Christopher Lasch

Environmentalism opposes reckless innovation and makes conservation the central order of business... view

By: Christopher Lasch

Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure... view

By: Christopher Lasch

George Orwell's contention was that it is a sure sign of trouble when things can no longer be called by their right names and described in plain, forthright speech... view

By: Christopher Lasch

Ideologies, however appealing, cannot shape the whole structure of perceptions and conduct unless they are embedded in daily experiences that confirm them... view

By: Christopher Lasch

The hope of a new politics does not lie in formulating a left-wing reply to the right-it lies in rejecting conventional political categories... view

By: Christopher Lasch