Quotes from Christopher Lasch

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger.

News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda.

The left has lost the common touch.

The news appeals to the same jaded appetite that makes a child tire of a toy as soon as it becomes familiar and demand a new one in its place.

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

In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs.

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

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.

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

Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it.

Make it new is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is largely a mirror image.

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.

Because it equates tradition with prejudice, the left finds itself increasingly unable to converse with ordinary people in their common language.

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

The family is a haven in a heartless world.

The contemporary climate is therapeutic, not religious. People today hunger not for personal salvation, let alone for the restoration of an earlier golden age, but for the feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal well-being, health, and psychic security.