Christopher Lasch Quotes

News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda.

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

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

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

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

Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.

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

Advertising serves not so much to advertise products as to promote consumption as a way of life. It 'educates' the masses into an unappeasable appetite not only for goods but for new experiences and personal fulfillment.

We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves.

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

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.

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

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

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

The work of art is a scream of freedom.

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

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 conservative revival cannot be dismissed.

The family is a haven in a heartless world.

Personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger.

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 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.

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

[Reinhold] Niebuhr endorsed G.K.Chesterton’s observation that tolerance is the attitude of those who do not believe in anything.

The proper role of humanists is not to bring 'human values' to the attention of technicians otherwise engaged in a purely instrumental approach to their calling, but to demand the restoration of the practical or moral element in callings that have degenerated into techniques.

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

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.