Top 90 Christopher Lasch Quotes (2025 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. “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

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

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

9. “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

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

— Christopher Lasch

11. “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

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

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

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

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

21. “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.”

— Christopher Lasch

22. “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

23. “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

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

— Christopher Lasch

25. “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

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. “Neoclassical economics insists that advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they don’t already want to buy.”

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

30. “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

31. “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.”

— Christopher Lasch

32. “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

33. “The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types.”

— Christopher Lasch

34. “Having given up the effort to raise the general level of competence – the old meaning of democracy – we are content to institutionalize competence in the caring class, which arrogates to itself the job of looking out for everybody else. Populism, as I understand it, is unambiguously committed to the.”

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

36. “Once women begin to question the inevitability of their subordination and to reject the conventions formerly associated with it, they can no longer retreat to the safety of those conventions.”

— Christopher Lasch

37. “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

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

— Christopher Lasch

39. “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

40. “It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times – the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie – seem attractive by comparison.”

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

43. “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

44. “Much of what is euphemistically known as the middle class, merely because it dresses up to go to work, is now reduced to proletarian conditions of existence. Many white-collar jobs require no more skill and pay even less than blue-collar jobs, conferring little status or security.”

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

47. “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

48. “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

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

— Christopher Lasch

50. “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