Top 90 Christopher Lasch Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “The work of art is a scream of freedom.”

— Christopher Lasch

2. “The family is a haven in a heartless world.”

— Christopher Lasch

3. “Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.”

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

5. “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

6. “Conservatives unwittingly side with the social forces that contribute to the destruction of traditional values.”

— Christopher Lasch

7. “It’s not about winning. It’s the enjoyment of doing it – it gets your brain going.”

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

12. “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.”

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

14. “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

15. “Uprootedness uproots everything except the need for roots.”

— Christopher Lasch

16. “The best defense against the terror of existence are the homely comforts of love, work, and family life, which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet responsive to our needs.”

— Christopher Lasch

17. “We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves.”

— Christopher Lasch

18. “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

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

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

21. “In a society in which the dream of success has been drained of any meaning beyond itself, men have nothing against which to measure their achievements except the achievements of others.”

— Christopher Lasch

22. “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.”

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

24. “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.”

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

27. “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.”

— Christopher Lasch

28. “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

29. “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.”

— Christopher Lasch

30. “Personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger.”

— Christopher Lasch

31. “Man’s collective mastery of nature – even if we could ignore the mounting evidence that this too is largely an illusion – can hardly be expected to confer a sense of confidence and well- being when it coexists with centralizing forces that have deprived individuals of any mastery over the concrete, immediate conditions of their existence. The collective control allegedly conferred by science is an abstraction that has little resonance in everyday life.”

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

33. “Advertising serves not so much to advertise products as to promote consumption as a way of life. It ‘educates’ the masses into an unappeasable appetite not only for goods but for new experiences and personal fulfillment.”

— Christopher Lasch

34. “The left ask people to believe that there is no conflict between feminism and the family.”

— Christopher Lasch

35. “In real life, as opposed to pluralist fantasy, every moral and cultural choice of any consequence rules out a whole series of other choices. In an age of images and ideology, however, the difference between reality and fantasy becomes increasingly elusive.”

— Christopher Lasch

36. “Members of the educated elite upheld open-mindedness as the supreme political virtue but refused to debate their own idea of the good life, perhaps because they suspected that it could not withstand exposure to more vigorous ideas.”

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

38. “The conservative revival cannot be dismissed.”

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

41. “The poor have always had to live for the present, but now a desperate concern for personal survival, sometimes disguised as hedonism, engulfs the middle class as well.”

— Christopher Lasch

42. “To live for the moment is the prevailing passion – to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity. We are fast losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future.”

— Christopher Lasch

43. “Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all.”

— Christopher Lasch

44. “This inquiry began with a deceptively simple question. How does it happen that serious people continue to believe in progress, in the face of massive evidence that might have been expected to refute the idea of progress once and for all?”

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

46. “For all his inner suffering, the narcissist has many traits that make for success in bureaucratic institutions, which put premium on the manipulation of interpersonal relations, discourage the formation of deep personal attachments, and at the same time provide the narcissist with the approval he needs in order to validate his self-esteem.”

— Christopher Lasch

47. “We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change.”

— Christopher Lasch

48. “The intellectual debility of contemporary conservatism is indicated by its silence on all important matters.”

— Christopher Lasch

49. “The reporting of news has to be understood as propaganda for commodities, and events by images.”

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch