Quotes By Christopher Lasch

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

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.

Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.

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.

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

The attempt to redefine the family as a purely voluntary arrangement grows out of the modern delusion that people can keep all their options open all the time.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.