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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
Order
Banality
Today
Overcome
Overcoming
Endless
Americans
Possibility
Social
Sense
Erected

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Make it new is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is largely a mirror image.
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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.
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The left ask people to believe that there is no conflict between feminism and the family.
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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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Traditionalists will have to master techniques of sustained activism formerly monopolized by the left.
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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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Neoclassical economics insists that advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they don't already want to buy.
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Drugs are merely the most obvious form of addiction in our society. Drug addiction is one of the things that undermines traditional values.
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The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction.
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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.
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We live in a historical period characterized by a sharp discrepancy between the intellectual development of man... and his mental-emotional development, which has left him still in a state of marked narcissism with all its pathological symptoms.
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We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves.
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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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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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Democracy in our time is more likely to die of indifference than of intolerance.
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The conservative revival cannot be dismissed.
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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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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 prison life of the past looks in our own time like liberation itself.
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Environmentalism opposes reckless innovation and makes conservation the central order of business.
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