Famous Quotes By Christopher Lasch

 

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Adherents of the new religious right reject the separation of politics and religion, but they bring no spiritual insights to politics.
4. Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice.
5. Conservatives sense a link between television and drugs, but they do not grasp the nature of this connection.
6. Drugs are merely the most obvious form of addiction in our society. Drug addiction is one of the things that undermines traditional values.
7. Environmentalism opposes reckless innovation and makes conservation the central order of business.
8. Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure.
9. 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.
10. In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs.
11. 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.
12. 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.
13. 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.
14. Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family their defense of families carries no conviction.
15. Most of these alternative arrangements, so-called, arise out of the ruins of marriages, not as an improvement of old fashioned marriage.
16. Most women are pragmatists who have allowed extremists on the left and right to manipulate the family issue for their own purposes.
17. Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
18. Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button.
19. 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.
20. 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.
21. The family wage has been eroded by the same developments that have promoted consumerism as a way of life.
22. 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.
23. The last three decades have seen the collapse of the family wage system.
24. The left ask people to believe that there is no conflict between feminism and the family.
25. The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types.
26. The left has come to regard common sense - the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community - as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment.
27. 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.
28. The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction.
29. 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.
30. 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.
31. We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change.
32. 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.