Christopher Lasch Quotes - Page 2

We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle-class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition.

The proper role of humanists is not to bring 'human values' to the attention of technicians otherwise engaged in a purely instrumental approach to their calling, but to demand the restoration of the practical or moral element in callings that have degenerated into techniques.

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

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

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.

I despise the cowardly clinging to life, purely for the sake of life, that seems so deeply ingrained in the American temperament.

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

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

Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all.

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

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 important way better than life today.

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

The same historical development that turned the citizen into a client transformed the worker from a producer into a consumer.

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.

The best defense against the terror of existence are the homely comforts of love, work, and family life, which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet responsive to our needs.

Personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger.

Even the reporting of news has to be understood not as propaganda for any particular ideology, liberal or conservative, but as propaganda for commodities — for the replacement of things by commodities, use values by exchange values, and events by images.

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.

Democracy in our time is more likely to die of indifference than of intolerance.

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.

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

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.