Christopher Lasch's Quotes

The left has lost the common touch.

The left has lost touch with popular opinion, thereby making it possible for the right to present itself as the party of common sense.

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

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.

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

We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Drugs are merely the most obvious form of addiction in our society. Drug addiction is one of the things that undermines traditional values.

Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.

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.

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.

Conservatives unwittingly side with the social forces that contribute to the destruction of traditional values.

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

Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it.

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.

The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types.

Adherents of the new religious right reject the separation of politics and religion, but they bring no spiritual insights to politics.

The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction.

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.

Conservatives have no understanding of modern capitalism. They have a distorted understanding of the traditional values they claim to defend.

In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs.

The family wage has been eroded by the same developments that have promoted consumerism as a way of life.

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.

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

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 new one in its place.

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.

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.

I consider myself a writer. I don't favour any type of writing. I sometimes wish short stories came more easily to me.

There are seldom more than a couple of students in any workshop who seem natural writers.

For a long period of history, you were what people said about you, and if your reputation was stained, you were in very serious trouble. People fought duels over this. Then it fades away historically.

I got into online trading. It was alarmingly easy to do. I went through the whole cycle of emotions, from supreme self-confidence to total impotence. I broke even in the end.

The short story seems like the best of all possible worlds. I do feel it is closer to writing poetry than to writing a novel, with its requirements of concentration and economy.

Writers tend to write stories as a kind of holiday between novels, or as preliminary steps towards a novel. Stories just don't often make up a writer's main body of work, and that's not because they don't see the market for it.