Quotes from Christopher Lasch

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change.

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

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

Most women are pragmatists who have allowed extremists on the left and right to manipulate the family issue for their own purposes.

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

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

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.

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 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.

Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family their defense of families carries no conviction.

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.

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

In a dying culture, narcissism appears to embody—in the guise of personal "growth" and "awareness"—the highest attainment of spiritual enlightenment. The custodians of culture hope, at bottom, merely to survive its collapse.

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

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

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

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.