Christopher Lasch Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

The family is a haven in a heartless world.

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

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

The prison life of the past looks in our own time like liberation itself.

Uprootedness uproots everything except the need for roots.

Make it new is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is largely a mirror image.

Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger.

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

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

Instead of taking environmentalism away from the left, conservatives condemn it as a counsel of doom.

Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family; their defense of families carries no conviction.

Most women are pragmatists who have allowed extremists on the left and right to manipulate the family issue for their own purposes.

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

The left has lost the common touch.

News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda.

It's not about winning. It's the enjoyment of doing it - it gets your brain going.

Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all.

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

The capacity for loyalty is stretched too thin when it tries to attach itself to the hypothetical solidarity of the human race.

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.

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

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

Most of these alternative arrangements, so-called, arise out of the ruins of marriages, not as an improvement of old fashioned marriage.

Democracy in our time is more likely to die of indifference than of intolerance.

I despise the cowardly clinging to life, purely for the sake of life, that seems so deeply ingrained in the American temperament.

Progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order.

Knowledge is what we get when an observer, preferably a scientifically trained observer, provides us with a copy of reality that we can all recognize.

Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button.

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

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

In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs.

Neoclassical economics insists that advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they don't already want to buy.

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

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

It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.

We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change.

The conservative revival cannot be dismissed.

In an individualistic culture, the narcissist is God's gift to the world. In a collectivist society, the narcissist is God's gift to the collective.

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

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

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

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.