Top 90 Christopher Lasch Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “When liberals finally grasped the strength of popular feeling about the family, they cried to appropriate the rhetoric and symbolism of family values for their own purposes.”

— Christopher Lasch

52. “Instead of taking environmentalism away from the left, conservatives condemn it as a counsel of doom.”

— Christopher Lasch

53. “It appears that the prostitute, not the salesman, best exemplifies the qualities indispensable to success in American society.”

— Christopher Lasch

54. “Since “the society” has no future, it makes sense to live only for the moment, to fix our eyes on our own “private performance,” to become connoisseurs of our own decadence, to cultivate a “transcendental self-attention.”

— Christopher Lasch

55. “Today it is the elites... those who control the international flow of money and information, preside over philanthropic foundations and institutions of higher learning, manage the instruments of cultural production and thus set the terms of public debate – that have lost faith in the values, or what remains of them, of the West.”

— Christopher Lasch

56. “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

57. “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

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

— Christopher Lasch

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

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

— Christopher Lasch

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

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

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

68. “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

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

— Christopher Lasch

70. “Every society reproduces its culture, its norms, its underlying assumptions, its modes of organizing experience – in the individual, in the form of personality.”

— Christopher Lasch

71. “News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda.”

— Christopher Lasch

72. “Traditionalists will have to master techniques of sustained activism formerly monopolized by the left.”

— Christopher Lasch

73. “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.”

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

75. “The left has lost touch with popular opinion, thereby making it possible for the right to present itself as the party of common sense.”

— Christopher Lasch

76. “The job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information.”

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

79. “Social criticism that addressed the real issue in higher education today – the university’s assimilation into the corporate order, and the emergence of a knowledge class whose “subversive” activities do not seriously threaten any vested interest – would be a welcome addition to contemporary discourse. For obvious reasons, however, this kind of discourse is unlikely to get much encouragement either from the academic left, or from its critics on the right.”

— Christopher Lasch

80. “Unable to conceive of a God who does not regard human happiness as the be-all and end-all of creation, they cannot accept the central paradox of religious faith: that the secret of happiness lies in renouncing the right to be happy.”

— Christopher Lasch

81. “The left has lost the common touch.”

— Christopher Lasch

82. “The illusion of feeling well-informed... a public that feels informed in proportion as it is to befuddled. In one of his characteristic pronouncements, at a press conference in May 1962, John F. Kennedy proclaimed the end of ideology in words that appealed to both these public needs-the need to believe that political decisions are in the hands of dispassionate, bipartisan experts and the need to believe that the problems experts deal with are unintelligible to laymen.”

— Christopher Lasch

83. “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

84. “Conservatives have no understanding of modern capitalism. They have a distorted understanding of the traditional values they claim to defend.”

— Christopher Lasch

85. “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

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

— Christopher Lasch

87. “Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice.”

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

89. “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.”

— Christopher Lasch

90. “The proper role of humanists is not to bring ‘human values’ to the attention of technicians otherwise engaged in a purely instrumental approach to their calling, but to demand the restoration of the practical or moral element in callings that have degenerated into techniques.”

— Christopher Lasch

91. “The mass media, with their cult of celebrity and their attempt to surround it with glamour and excitement, have made Americans a nation of fans, moviegoers. The media give substance to and thus intensify narcissistic dreams of fame and glory, encourage the common man to identify himself with the stars and to hate the “herd,” and make it more and more difficult for him to accept the banality of everyday existence.”

— Christopher Lasch

92. “Once knowledge is equated with ideology, it is no longer necessary to argue with opponents on intellectual grounds or to enter into their point of view. It is enough to dismiss them as Eurocentric, racist, sexist, homophobic in other words, as politically suspect.”

— Christopher Lasch

93. “When the images of power overshadow the reality, those without power find themselves fighting phantoms.”

— Christopher Lasch

94. “Ruling classes have always sought to instill in their subordinates the capacity to experience exploitation and material deprivation as guilt, while deceiving themselves that their own material interests coincide with those of mankind as a whole.”

— Christopher Lasch

95. “In the nineteenth century, elites alone obeyed the laws of fashion, exchanging old possessions for new ones for no other reason than that they had gone out of style. Economic orthodoxy condemned the rest of society to a life of drudgery and mere subsistence. The mass production of luxury items now extends aristocratic habits to the masses.”

— Christopher Lasch

96. “Until we have to defend our opinions in public, they remain opinions in Lippmann’s pejorative sense – half-formed convictions based on random impressions and unexamined assumptions. It is the act of articulating and defending our views that lifts them out of the category of “opinions,” gives them shape and definition, and makes it possible for others to recognize them as a description of their own experience as well. In short, we come to know our own minds only by explaining ourselves to others.”

— Christopher Lasch

97. “The issues that give rise to strident professions of faith on both sides of the ideological divide seem to have little bearing on the problems most people face in everyday life. Politics has become a matter of ideological gestures while the real problems remain unsolved.”

— Christopher Lasch