Christopher Lasch Quotes
"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."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Lie, Appetite, Desire, Ownership, Possessions)
"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."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Family, Awareness, Liberals, Popular)
"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."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Life, Society, Past, Today)
"Adherents of the new religious right reject the separation of politics and religion, but they bring no spiritual insights to politics."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Politics, Religion, Religious, Right, Separation, Spiritual)
"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."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Family, Abortion, Bigotry, Crime, Curriculum, Defense, Nothing, Popular, School, Superstition)
"Relentless improvement of the product and upgrading of consumer tastes are the heart of mass merchandising."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Heart, Improvement)
"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."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Family, Time, People, Delusion, Open, Options)
"The conservative revival cannot be dismissed."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Conservative)
"The family wage has been eroded by the same developments that have promoted consumerism as a way of life."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Family, Life, Wage)
"The intellectual debility of contemporary conservatism is indicated by its silence on all important matters."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Conservatism, Silence)
"The job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Debate, Information, Job, Press, Public)
"The last three decades have seen the collapse of the family wage system."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Family, Wage)
"The left ask people to believe that there is no conflict between feminism and the family."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Family, People, Conflict, Feminism)
"The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Family, Life, Diversity, Talk)
"The left has come to regard common sense - the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community - as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Wisdom, Progress, Common sense, Community)
"The left has lost the common touch."
- 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."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Society, People, Propaganda, Sense, Suspicion)
"The left no longer stands for common sense, as it did in the days of Tom Paine."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Common sense)
"The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Belief, Addiction, Effect, Media)
"The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Society, Addiction, Ownership)
"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."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Appetite, Jaded, News)
"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."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Politics, Religion, Right)
"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."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Family, Society, Now, Question)
"The reporting of news has to be understood as propaganda for commodities, and events by images."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Events, News, Propaganda)
"The same historical development that turned the citizen into a client transformed the worker from a producer into a consumer."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Development)
"Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Possibility, Americans, Order, Sense, Today)
"Traditionalists will have to master techniques of sustained activism formerly monopolized by the left."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Activism, Will)
"We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Change, Now)
"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."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Family, Strength, Values, Feeling, Liberals, Popular, Rhetoric)
"Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Love, Politics, Justice, Measure)
"The left has lost touch with popular opinion, thereby making it possible for the right to present itself as the party of common sense."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Common sense, Opinion, Party, Popular, Present, Right)
"Information, usually seen as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its by-product."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Debate, Information)
"Because it equates tradition with prejudice, the left finds itself increasingly unable to converse with ordinary people in their common language."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: People, Language, Prejudice, Tradition)
"Conservatives sense a link between television and drugs, but they do not grasp the nature of this connection."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Nature, Connection, Drugs, Sense, Television)
"Conservatives unwittingly side with the social forces that contribute to the destruction of traditional values."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Values, Destruction)
"Drugs are merely the most obvious form of addiction in our society. Drug addiction is one of the things that undermines traditional values."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Society, Values, Addiction, Drugs, Obvious)
"Environmentalism opposes reckless innovation and makes conservation the central order of business."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Business, Conservation, Innovation, Order)
"Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Age, Character)
"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."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Contention, Names, Right, Speech, Trouble)
"Ideologies, however appealing, cannot shape the whole structure of perceptions and conduct unless they are embedded in daily experiences that confirm them."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Perceptions)
"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."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Politics, Lie, Hope, Lies, Right)
"In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Experience, Society, Drugs, Want)
"Progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Crisis, Effect, Order, Rhetoric)
"Instead of taking environmentalism away from the left, conservatives condemn it as a counsel of doom."
- Christopher Lasch
"It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Advertising, Logic, Media, Reality)
"It is no longer an unwritten law of American capitalism that industry will attempt to maintain wages at a level that allows a single wage to support a family."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Family, American, Capitalism, Law, Support, Wage, Wages, Will)
"Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Success, Appearance, Nothing)
"Personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Danger)
"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."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: God, Society, Culture, World)
"Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Conservatism, Denial, Ideology, Smile, Symbol)
"It is the logic of consumerism that undermines the values of loyalty and permanence and promotes a different set of values that is destructive of family life."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Family, Life, Values, Logic, Loyalty)
"News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Advertising, Liberal, News, Propaganda)
"Neoclassical economics insists that advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they don't already want to buy."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Advertising, Economics, Force, Want)
"Most women are pragmatists who have allowed extremists on the left and right to manipulate the family issue for their own purposes."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Family, Women, Right)
"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."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Knowledge, Reality)
"Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: People)
"Most of these alternative arrangements, so-called, arise out of the ruins of marriages, not as an improvement of old fashioned marriage."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Marriage, Improvement, Old)
"Make it new is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is largely a mirror image."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Art)
"Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family; their defense of families carries no conviction."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: Family, Conviction, Defense, Liberals)