Christopher Lasch Quotes - Page 3

[Reinhold] Niebuhr endorsed G.K.Chesterton’s observation that tolerance is the attitude of those who do not believe in anything.

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.

News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda.

It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times -- the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie -- seem attractive by comparison.

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.

Relentless improvement of the product and upgrading of consumer tastes are the heart of mass merchandising.

Uprootedness uproots everything except the need for roots.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The prison life of the past looks in our own time like liberation itself.

Parents accept their obsolescence with the best grace they can muster. . . they do all they can to make it easy for the younger generation to surpass the older, while secretly dreading the rejection that follows.

The last three decades have seen the collapse of the family wage system.

Environmentalism opposes reckless innovation and makes conservation the central order of business.

Information, usually seen as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its by-product.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.