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 Quote

Because it equates tradition with prejudice, the left finds itself increasingly unable to converse with ordinary people in their common language.
- Christopher Lasch Quote

Conservatives sense a link between television and drugs, but they do not grasp the nature of this connection.
- Christopher Lasch Quote

Conservatives unwittingly side with the social forces that contribute to the destruction of traditional values.
- Christopher Lasch Quote

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 Quote

Environmentalism opposes reckless innovation and makes conservation the central order of business.
- Christopher Lasch Quote

Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure.
- Christopher Lasch Quote

Ideologies, however appealing, cannot shape the whole structure of perceptions and conduct unless they are embedded in daily experiences that confirm them.
- Christopher Lasch Quote

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 Quote

Instead of taking environmentalism away from the left, conservatives condemn it as a counsel of doom.
- Christopher Lasch Quote

It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.
- Christopher Lasch Quote

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.
- Christopher Lasch Quote

Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family; their defense of families carries no conviction.
- Christopher Lasch Quote

Make it new is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is largely a mirror image.
- Christopher Lasch Quote

Most of these alternative arrangements, so-called, arise out of the ruins of marriages, not as an improvement of old fashioned marriage.
- Christopher Lasch Quote

Most women are pragmatists who have allowed extremists on the left and right to manipulate the family issue for their own purposes.
- Christopher Lasch Quote

Neoclassical economics insists that advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they don't already want to buy.
- Christopher Lasch Quote

Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
- Christopher Lasch Quote

Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button.
- Christopher Lasch Quote

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 Quote

Relentless improvement of the product and upgrading of consumer tastes are the heart of mass merchandising.
- Christopher Lasch Quote

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 Quote

The conservative revival cannot be dismissed.
- Christopher Lasch Quote

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 Quote

The intellectual debility of contemporary conservatism is indicated by its silence on all important matters.
- Christopher Lasch Quote

The job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information.
- Christopher Lasch Quote

The left ask people to believe that there is no conflict between feminism and the family.
- Christopher Lasch Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

The left no longer stands for common sense, as it did in the days of Tom Paine.
- Christopher Lasch Quote

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 Quote

The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction.
- Christopher Lasch Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

The reporting of news has to be understood as propaganda for commodities, and events by images.
- Christopher Lasch Quote

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 Quote

Traditionalists will have to master techniques of sustained activism formerly monopolized by the left.
- Christopher Lasch Quote

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 Quote