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Christopher Lasch Quotes |
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Christopher Lasch Quotes
- 1
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.
Christopher Lasch
- 2
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
- 3
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
- 4
Because it equates tradition with prejudice, the left finds itself increasingly unable to converse with ordinary people in their common language.
Christopher Lasch
- 5
Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice.
Christopher Lasch
- 6
Conservatives sense a link between television and drugs, but they do not grasp the nature of this connection.
Christopher Lasch
- 7
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
- 8
Environmentalism opposes reckless innovation and makes conservation the central order of business.
Christopher Lasch
- 9
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
- 10
Ideologies, however appealing, cannot shape the whole structure of perceptions and conduct unless they are embedded in daily experiences that confirm them.
Christopher Lasch
- 11
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
- 12
In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs.
Christopher Lasch
- 13
Information, usually seen as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its by-product.
Christopher Lasch
- 14
It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.
Christopher Lasch
- 15
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
- 16
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
- 17
Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family; their defense of families carries no conviction.
Christopher Lasch
- 18
Most of these alternative arrangements, so-called, arise out of the ruins of marriages, not as an improvement of old fashioned marriage.
Christopher Lasch
- 19
Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all.
Christopher Lasch
- 20
Most women are pragmatists who have allowed extremists on the left and right to manipulate the family issue for their own purposes.
Christopher Lasch
- 21
Neoclassical economics insists that advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they don't already want to buy.
Christopher Lasch
- 22
News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda.
Christopher Lasch
- 23
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Christopher Lasch
- 24
Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button.
Christopher Lasch
- 25
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
- 26
Relentless improvement of the product and upgrading of consumer tastes are the heart of mass merchandising.
Christopher Lasch
- 27
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
- 28
The conservative revival cannot be dismissed.
Christopher Lasch
- 29
The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction.
Christopher Lasch
- 30
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
- 31
The job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information.
Christopher Lasch
- 32
The last three decades have seen the collapse of the family wage system.
Christopher Lasch
- 33
The left ask people to believe that there is no conflict between feminism and the family.
Christopher Lasch
- 34
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
- 35
The left has lost the common touch.
Christopher Lasch
- 36
The left no longer stands for common sense, as it did in the days of Tom Paine.
Christopher Lasch
- 37
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
- 38
The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction.
Christopher Lasch
- 39
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
- 40
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
- 41
The reporting of news has to be understood as propaganda for commodities, and events by images.
Christopher Lasch
- 42
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
- 43
Traditionalists will have to master techniques of sustained activism formerly monopolized by the left.
Christopher Lasch
- 44
We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change.
Christopher Lasch
- 45
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
