Christopher Lasch Quotes

72 quotes in 977 categories

• Ideologies, however appealing, cannot shape the whole structure of perceptions and conduct unless they are embedded in daily experiences that confirm them.
• 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.
• 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…
• Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice.
• Conservatives sense a link between television and drugs, but they do not grasp the nature of this connection.
• The intellectual debility of contemporary conservatism is indicated by its silence on all important matters.
• 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…
• It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.
• Make it new is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is largely a mirror image.
• Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button.
• The same historical development that turned the citizen into a client transformed the worker from a producer into a consumer.
• Traditionalists will have to master techniques of sustained activism formerly monopolized by the left.
• 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…
• Environmentalism opposes reckless innovation and makes conservation the central order of business.
• Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure.
• Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family; their defense of families carries no conviction.
• Most of these alternative arrangements, so-called, arise out of the ruins of marriages, not as an improvement of old fashioned marriage.
• Most women are pragmatists who have allowed extremists on the left and right to manipulate the family issue for their own purposes.
• Neoclassical economics insists that advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they don't already want to buy.
• News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda.

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