Christopher Lasch Quotes

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Christopher Lasch

Profession : Historian

Birth : June 1, 1932

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.

Christopher Lasch

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

Christopher Lasch

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

Christopher Lasch

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

Christopher Lasch

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

Christopher Lasch

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

Christopher Lasch

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

Christopher Lasch

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.

Christopher Lasch

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

Christopher Lasch

Personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger.

Christopher Lasch

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

Christopher Lasch

News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda.

Christopher Lasch

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

Christopher Lasch

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

Christopher Lasch

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

Christopher Lasch

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

Christopher Lasch

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.

Christopher Lasch

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

Christopher Lasch

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

Christopher Lasch

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.

Christopher Lasch