Christopher Lasch Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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