Christopher Lasch Quotes (65 Quotes)


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

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

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

    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.

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



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

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

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

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

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

    moral paralysis of those who value 'openness' above all (democracy is more than) openness and toleration... In the absence of common standards... tolerance becomes indifference.

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

    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.

    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 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.

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

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

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

    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.

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

    replaced character building with permissiveness, the cure of souls with the cure of the psyche, blind justice with therapeutic justice, philosophy with social science, personal authority with an equally irrational authority of professional experts. It has tempered competition with antagonistic cooperation . . . It has surrounded people with 'symbolically mediated information' and has substituted images of reality for reality itself. Without intending to, it has created new forms of illiteracy.

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

    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.

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

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

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

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


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


    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.

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

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

    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.

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


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

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

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

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



    We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle-class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival.

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

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

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

    Once women begin to question the inevitability of their subordination and to reject the conventions formerly associated with it, they can no longer retreat to the safety of those conventions.


    More Christopher Lasch Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Family - Society & Civilization - Media & News - Drugs - Reality - Sense & Perception - Fame - Consumerism - Advices - Liberal - Religions & Spirituality - Custom & Convention - Politics - Life - Justice - Purposes - Logic - Art - Sign & Symbol - View All Christopher Lasch Quotations

    Related Authors


    Lord Acton - William Manchester - Stephen Ambrose - Robert Conquest - Polybius - James Mill - Herodotus - Harold Acton - Hannah Arendt - Flavius Josephus


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