Christopher Lasch quotes

Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success. (Christopher Lasch)
We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves.
Christopher Lasch
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.
Christopher Lasch
Conservatives unwittingly side with the social forces that contribute to the destruction of traditional values.
Christopher Lasch
The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction.
Christopher Lasch
We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change.
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
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
The family wage has been eroded by the same developments that have promoted consumerism as a way of life.
Christopher Lasch
Progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order.
Christopher Lasch
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)
Because it equates tradition with prejudice, the left finds itself increasingly unable to converse with ordinary people in their common language.
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 left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types.
Christopher Lasch
The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction.
Christopher Lasch
Conservatives have no understanding of modern capitalism. They have a distorted understanding of the traditional values they claim to defend.
Christopher Lasch
Traditionalists will have to master techniques of sustained activism formerly monopolized by the left.
Christopher Lasch
Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button.
Christopher Lasch
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.
Christopher Lasch
Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family; their defense of families carries no conviction.
Christopher Lasch
The same historical development that turned the citizen into a client transformed the worker from a producer into a consumer. (Christopher Lasch)
Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure.
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
Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it.
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