Top 90 Christopher Lasch Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Traditionalists will have to master techniques of sustained activism formerly monopolized by the left.”

— Christopher Lasch

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

57. “The conservative revival cannot be dismissed.”

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

62. “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

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

— Christopher Lasch

64. “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

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

— Christopher Lasch

66. “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

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

— Christopher Lasch

68. “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

69. “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

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

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

74. “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

75. “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

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

— Christopher Lasch

77. “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

78. “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

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

— Christopher Lasch

80. “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

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

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

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

— Christopher Lasch

86. “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

87. “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

88. “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

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

— Christopher Lasch

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

— 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. “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

93. “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

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. “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

96. “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

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