Christopher Lasch Quotes

We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves.

Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.

The family is a haven in a heartless world.

Progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order.

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.

Advertising serves not so much to advertise products as to promote consumption as a way of life. It 'educates' the masses into an unappeasable appetite not only for goods but for new experiences and personal fulfillment.

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.

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

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

The left has come to regard common sense - the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community - as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment.

The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction.

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

Once women begin to question the inevitability of their subordination and to reject the conventions formerly associated with it, they can no longer retreat to the safety of those conventions.

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

We live in a historical period characterized by a sharp discrepancy between the intellectual development of man... and his mental-emotional development, which has left him still in a state of marked narcissism with all its pathological symptoms.

The left has lost the common touch.

Once women begin to question the inevitability of their subordination and to reject the conventions formerly associated with it, they can no longer retreat to the safety of those conventions. The woman who rejects the stereotype of feminine weakness and dependence can no longer find much comfort in the clich? that all men are beasts. She has no choice except to believe, on the contrary, that men are human beings, and she finds it hard to forgive them when they act like animals.

Much of what is euphemistically known as the middle class, merely because it dresses up to go to work, is now reduced to proletarian conditions of existence. Many white-collar jobs require no more skill and pay even less than blue-collar jobs, conferring little status or security.

The work of art is a scream of freedom.

We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change.

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

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

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.

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

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.