A child's appetite for new toys appeal to the desire for ownership and appropriation: the appeal of toys comes to lie not in their use but in their status as possessions.
Christopher Lasch

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.
Christopher Lasch

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.
Christopher Lasch

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

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

Conservatives have no understanding of modern capitalism. They have a distorted understanding of the traditional values they claim to defend.
Christopher Lasch

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

Conservatives unwittingly side with the social forces that contribute to the destruction of traditional values.
Christopher Lasch

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


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

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

Ideologies, however appealing, cannot shape the whole structure of perceptions and conduct unless they are embedded in daily experiences that confirm them.
Christopher Lasch

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.
Christopher Lasch

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

Information, usually seen as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its by-product.
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

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.
Christopher Lasch