Quotes By Christopher Lasch

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 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.

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.

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.

The left sees nothing but bigotry and superstition in the popular defense of the family or in popular attitudes regarding abortion, crime, busing, and the school curriculum.

News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda.

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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

Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all.

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

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

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.

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

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

The conservative revival cannot be dismissed.

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

Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.

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

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.