“The left has come to regard common sense – the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community – as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment.”
– Christopher Lasch
“Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.”
– Christopher Lasch
“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.”
– Christopher Lasch
“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.”
– Christopher Lasch
“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.”
– Christopher Lasch
“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.”
– Christopher Lasch
“The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction.”
– Christopher Lasch
“In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs.”
– Christopher Lasch
“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.”
– Christopher Lasch
“Drugs are merely the most obvious form of addiction in our society. Drug addiction is one of the things that undermines traditional values.”
– Christopher Lasch
“Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button.”
– Christopher Lasch
“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.”
– Christopher Lasch
“Adherents of the new religious right reject the separation of politics and religion, but they bring no spiritual insights to politics.”
– Christopher Lasch
“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.”
– Christopher Lasch
“Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice.”
– Christopher Lasch
“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.”
– Christopher Lasch
“Adherents of the new religious right reject the separation of politics and religion, but they bring no spiritual insights to politics.”
– Christopher Lasch
“Conservatives sense a link between television and drugs, but they do not grasp the nature of this connection.”
– Christopher Lasch
“Most of these alternative arrangements, so-called, arise out of the ruins of marriages, not as an improvement of old fashioned marriage.”
– 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.”
– Christopher Lasch
“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.”
– Christopher Lasch
“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.”
– Christopher Lasch
“Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family their defense of families carries no conviction.”
– Christopher Lasch
“Most women are pragmatists who have allowed extremists on the left and right to manipulate the family issue for their own purposes.”
– Christopher Lasch
“The last three decades have seen the collapse of the family wage system.”
– Christopher Lasch
“The left ask people to believe that there is no conflict between feminism and the family.”
– Christopher Lasch
“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.”
– Christopher Lasch
“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.”
– 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.”
– Christopher Lasch
“The family wage has been eroded by the same developments that have promoted consumerism as a way of life.”
– Christopher Lasch