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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
Social
Sense
Erected
Order
Banality
Today
Overcome
Overcoming
Endless
Americans
Possibility

More quotes by Christopher Lasch

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The left ask people to believe that there is no conflict between feminism and the family.
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The work of art is a scream of freedom.
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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 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 same historical development that turned the citizen into a client transformed the worker from a producer into a consumer.
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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 effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction.
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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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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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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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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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Adherents of the new religious right reject the separation of politics and religion, but they bring no spiritual insights to politics.
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Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice.
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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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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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Conservatives sense a link between television and drugs, but they do not grasp the nature of this connection.
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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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It's not about winning. It's the enjoyment of doing it - it gets your brain going.
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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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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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