Quotes By Christopher Lasch

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 conservative revival cannot be dismissed.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger.

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.