Best 78 quotes of Christopher Lasch on MyQuotes

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.

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

Advertising serves not so much to advertise products as to promote consumption as a way of life. It 'educates' the masses into an unappeasable appetite not only for goods but for new experiences and personal fulfillment.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Democracy in our time is more likely to die of indifference than of intolerance.

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

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

Even the reporting of news has to be understood not as propaganda for any particular ideology, liberal or conservative, but as propaganda for commodities — for the replacement of things by commodities, use values by exchange values, and events by images.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times -- the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie -- seem attractive by comparison.

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.

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.

It's not about winning. It's the enjoyment of doing it - it gets your brain going.

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.

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

Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all.

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

Much of what is euphemistically known as the middle class, merely because it dresses up to go to work, is now reduced to proletarian conditions of existence. Many white-collar jobs require no more skill and pay even less than blue-collar jobs, conferring little status or security.

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

News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda.

Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.

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.

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. The woman who rejects the stereotype of feminine weakness and dependence can no longer find much comfort in the clich? that all men are beasts. She has no choice except to believe, on the contrary, that men are human beings, and she finds it hard to forgive them when they act like animals.

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

Parents accept their obsolescence with the best grace they can muster. . . they do all they can to make it easy for the younger generation to surpass the older, while secretly dreading the rejection that follows.

Personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger.

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

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.

[Reinhold] Niebuhr endorsed G.K.Chesterton’s observation that tolerance is the attitude of those who do not believe in anything.

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

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 best defense against the terror of existence are the homely comforts of love, work, and family life, which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet responsive to our needs.

The conservative revival cannot be dismissed.

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

The family is a haven in a heartless world.

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