Christopher Lasch Quotes
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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.
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Most of these alternative arrangements, so-called, arise out of the ruins of marriages, not as an improvement of old fashioned marriage.
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The left no longer stands for common sense, as it did in the days of Tom Paine.
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Ideologies, however appealing, cannot shape the whole structure of perceptions and conduct unless they are embedded in daily experiences that confirm them.
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The intellectual debility of contemporary conservatism is indicated by its silence on all important matters.
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Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
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In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs.
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Instead of taking environmentalism away from the left, conservatives condemn it as a counsel of doom.
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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.
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Adherents of the new religious right reject the separation of politics and religion, but they bring no spiritual insights to politics.
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The family wage has been eroded by the same developments that have promoted consumerism as a way of life.
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Environmentalism opposes reckless innovation and makes conservation the central order of business.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all.
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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.
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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.
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News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda.
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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.
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The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types.
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The left has come to regard common sense - the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community - as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment.
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Most women are pragmatists who have allowed extremists on the left and right to manipulate the family issue for their own purposes.