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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.

Christopher Lasch

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Christopher Lasch
Age: 61 †
Born: 1932
Born: June 1
Died: 1994
Died: February 14
Historian
Journalist
Social Critic
Sociologist
Writer
Omaha
Nebraska
Robert Christopher Lasch
Americans
Possibility
Social
Sense
Erected
Order
Banality
Today
Overcome
Overcoming
Endless

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The prison life of the past looks in our own time like liberation itself.
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I despise the cowardly clinging to life, purely for the sake of life, that seems so deeply ingrained in the American temperament.
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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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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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We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves.
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The same historical development that turned the citizen into a client transformed the worker from a producer into a consumer.
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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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Much of what is euphemistically known as the middle class, merely because it dresses up to go to work, is now reduced to proletarian conditions of existence. Many white-collar jobs require no more skill and pay even less than blue-collar jobs, conferring little status or security.
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Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all.
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It's not about winning. It's the enjoyment of doing it - it gets your brain going.
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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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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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The left ask people to believe that there is no conflict between feminism and the family.
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Conservatives unwittingly side with the social forces that contribute to the destruction of traditional values.
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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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[Reinhold] Niebuhr endorsed G.K.Chesterton’s observation that tolerance is the attitude of those who do not believe in anything.
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The left no longer stands for common sense, as it did in the days of Tom Paine.
Christopher Lasch
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Advertising serves not so much to advertise products as to promote consumption as a way of life. It 'educates' the masses into an unappeasable appetite not only for goods but for new experiences and personal fulfillment.
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The left has lost the common touch.
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The best defense against the terror of existence are the homely comforts of love, work, and family life, which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet responsive to our needs.
Christopher Lasch