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Christopher Lasch [1932-1994] American

Rank: 101
Historian

Christopher "Kit" Lasch was an American historian, moralist, and social critic.
Lasch was a history professor at the University of Rochester.

Family, Politics, Hope, Religion, Smile, Society, Strength, Success

Quote	Tags	Rank
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.	Success	101
Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all.		102
Relentless improvement of the product and upgrading of consumer tastes are the heart of mass merchandising.		103
The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction.		104
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.	Family, Society	105
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.	Family, Strength	106
It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.		107
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.	Family	108
Personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger.		109
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.	Family	110
Adherents of the new religious right reject the separation of politics and religion, but they bring no spiritual insights to politics.	Politics, Religion	111
Conservatives have no understanding of modern capitalism. They have a distorted understanding of the traditional values they claim to defend.		112
Progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order.		113
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.	Hope, Politics	114
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.		115
Conservatives unwittingly side with the social forces that contribute to the destruction of traditional values.		116
The left ask people to believe that there is no conflict between feminism and the family.		117
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.		118
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.		119
The family wage has been eroded by the same developments that have promoted consumerism as a way of life.		120
The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types.	Family	121
The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction.		122
Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it.		123
Neoclassical economics insists that advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they don't already want to buy.		124
Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure.		125
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.		126
Environmentalism opposes reckless innovation and makes conservation the central order of business.		201
Ideologies, however appealing, cannot shape the whole structure of perceptions and conduct unless they are embedded in daily experiences that confirm them.		202
In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs.		203
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.		204
Most women are pragmatists who have allowed extremists on the left and right to manipulate the family issue for their own purposes.		205
The intellectual debility of contemporary conservatism is indicated by its silence on all important matters.		206
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.		207
The reporting of news has to be understood as propaganda for commodities, and events by images.		208
Traditionalists will have to master techniques of sustained activism formerly monopolized by the left.		209
We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change.		210
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.		211
The job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information.		212
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.		213
Because it equates tradition with prejudice, the left finds itself increasingly unable to converse with ordinary people in their common language.		214
Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice.		215
Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family; their defense of families carries no conviction.		216
Most of these alternative arrangements, so-called, arise out of the ruins of marriages, not as an improvement of old fashioned marriage.		217
News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda.		218
Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button.	Smile	219
The conservative revival cannot be dismissed.		220
The left has come to regard common sense - the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community - as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment.		221
The left has lost touch with popular opinion, thereby making it possible for the right to present itself as the party of common sense.		222
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.		223
The same historical development that turned the citizen into a client transformed the worker from a producer into a consumer.		224
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.		225
Make it new is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is largely a mirror image.		226
Information, usually seen as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its by-product.		301
Conservatives sense a link between television and drugs, but they do not grasp the nature of this connection.		302
Instead of taking environmentalism away from the left, conservatives condemn it as a counsel of doom.		303
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.		304
The last three decades have seen the collapse of the family wage system.		305
The left has lost the common touch.		306
The left no longer stands for common sense, as it did in the days of Tom Paine.		307

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