Quotes by Christopher Lasch

About Christopher Lasch:

Christopher (Kit) Lasch was a well-known American historian, moralist, and social critic.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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.

Christopher Lasch

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

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.

Christopher Lasch

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

Christopher Lasch

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

Christopher Lasch

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.

Christopher Lasch

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

Christopher Lasch

Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it.

Christopher Lasch

Ideologies, however appealing, cannot shape the whole structure of perceptions and conduct unless they are embedded in daily experiences that confirm them.

Christopher Lasch

It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.

Christopher Lasch

Progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order.

Christopher Lasch

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

Christopher Lasch

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

Christopher Lasch

Personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger.

Christopher Lasch

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

Christopher Lasch

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

Christopher Lasch

Because it equates tradition with prejudice, the left finds itself increasingly unable to converse with ordinary people in their common language.

Christopher Lasch

Neoclassical economics insists that advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they don't already want to buy.

Christopher Lasch

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.

Christopher Lasch

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

Christopher Lasch

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

Christopher Lasch

Author Bio

  • NameChristopher Lasch
  • DescriptionAmerican historian
  • BornJune 1, 1932
  • DiedFebruary 14, 1994
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionHistorian; Social Critic; Writer
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; National Book Award