Quotes from Christopher Lasch

We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change.

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

Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

The conservative revival cannot be dismissed.

Traditionalists will have to master techniques of sustained activism formerly monopolized by the left.

Drugs are merely the most obvious form of addiction in our society. Drug addiction is one of the things that undermines traditional values.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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