Top 45 Christopher Lasch Quotes

News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda.

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

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.

The left has lost the common touch.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all.

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

The conservative revival cannot be dismissed.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger.

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.