Christopher Lasch
Historian
1932-06-01
Quotes by Christopher Lasch
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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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Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family; their defense of families carries no conviction.
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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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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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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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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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Conservatives unwittingly side with the social forces that contribute to the destruction of traditional values.
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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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Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure.
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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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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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The family wage has been eroded by the same developments that have promoted consumerism as a way of life.
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Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
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Nothing like the appearance of success, succeeds.
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