Quotes By Christopher Lasch

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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 has lost the common touch.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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