Christopher Lasch

“Relentless improvement of the product and upgrading of consumer tastes are the heart of mass merchandising.”

“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.”

“The left ask people to believe that there is no conflict between feminism and the family.”

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

“Make it new is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is largely a mirror image.”

“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.”

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

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

“The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction.”

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

“The family wage has been eroded by the same developments that have promoted consumerism as a way of life.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure.”

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

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