Christopher Lasch quotes - page 3

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
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.
Christopher Lasch
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.
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
Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all.
Christopher Lasch
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.
Christopher Lasch
The left no longer stands for common sense, as it did in the days of Tom Paine.
Christopher Lasch
The left has lost the common touch.
Christopher Lasch
Personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger.
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)
The family is a haven in a heartless world.
Christopher Lasch
The work of art is a scream of freedom.
Christopher Lasch
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.
Christopher Lasch
The proper role of humanists is not to bring 'human values' to the attention of technicians otherwise engaged in a purely instrumental approach to their calling, but to demand the restoration of the practical or moral element in callings that have degenerated into techniques.
Christopher Lasch
We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle-class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition.
Christopher Lasch
I despise the cowardly clinging to life, purely for the sake of life, that seems so deeply ingrained in the American temperament.
Christopher Lasch
We live in a historical period characterized by a sharp discrepancy between the intellectual development of man... and his mental-emotional development, which has left him still in a state of marked narcissism with all its pathological symptoms.
Christopher Lasch
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.
Christopher Lasch
Democracy in our time is more likely to die of indifference than of intolerance.
Christopher Lasch
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. (Christopher Lasch)
Uprootedness uproots everything except the need for roots.
Christopher Lasch
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.
Christopher Lasch
The prison life of the past looks in our own time like liberation itself.
Christopher Lasch
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.
Christopher Lasch