Christopher Lasch Quotes
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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.
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Information, usually seen as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its by-product.
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Because it equates tradition with prejudice, the left finds itself increasingly unable to converse with ordinary people in their common language.
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Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice.
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Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family; their defense of families carries no conviction.
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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.
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Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure.
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Conservatives sense a link between television and drugs, but they do not grasp the nature of this connection.
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Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it.
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Relentless improvement of the product and upgrading of consumer tastes are the heart of mass merchandising.
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The left has lost the common touch.
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The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction.
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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.
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The left has lost touch with popular opinion, thereby making it possible for the right to present itself as the party of common sense.
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The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction.
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The job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information.
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The left sees nothing but bigotry and superstition in the popular defense of the family or in popular attitudes regarding abortion, crime, busing, and the school curriculum.
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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.
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Personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger.
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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.
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We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change.
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Conservatives have no understanding of modern capitalism. They have a distorted understanding of the traditional values they claim to defend.
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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.
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The last three decades have seen the collapse of the family wage system.