Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Endless
Americans
Possibility
Social
Sense
Erected
Order
Banality
Today
Overcome
Overcoming

More quotes by Christopher Lasch

Image
The prison life of the past looks in our own time like liberation itself.
Christopher Lasch
Image
Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all.
Christopher Lasch
Image
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
Image
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.
Christopher Lasch
Image
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.
Christopher Lasch
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.
Christopher Lasch
Image
Environmentalism opposes reckless innovation and makes conservation the central order of business.
Christopher Lasch
Image
Most of these alternative arrangements, so-called, arise out of the ruins of marriages, not as an improvement of old fashioned marriage.
Christopher Lasch
Image
Traditionalists will have to master techniques of sustained activism formerly monopolized by the left.
Christopher Lasch
Image
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.
Christopher Lasch
Image
The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction.
Christopher Lasch
Image
The same historical development that turned the citizen into a client transformed the worker from a producer into a consumer.
Christopher Lasch
Image
Most women are pragmatists who have allowed extremists on the left and right to manipulate the family issue for their own purposes.
Christopher Lasch
Image
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.
Christopher Lasch
Image
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
Image
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.
Christopher Lasch
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The left no longer stands for common sense, as it did in the days of Tom Paine.
Christopher Lasch
Image
Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice.
Christopher Lasch