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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
Today
Overcome
Overcoming
Endless
Americans
Possibility
Social
Sense
Erected
Order
Banality

More quotes by Christopher Lasch

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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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Traditionalists will have to master techniques of sustained activism formerly monopolized by the left.
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The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction.
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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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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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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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The left has lost the common touch.
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Once women begin to question the inevitability of their subordination and to reject the conventions formerly associated with it, they can no longer retreat to the safety of those conventions.
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Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all.
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Relentless improvement of the product and upgrading of consumer tastes are the heart of mass merchandising.
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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 proper reply to right wing religiosity is not to insist that politics and religion don't mix. This is the stock response of the left.
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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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Uprootedness uproots everything except the need for roots.
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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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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
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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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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.
Christopher Lasch