Quote

The left has come to regard common sense - the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community - as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment.

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
Progress
Wisdom
Community
Folkways
Common
Obstacle
Sense
Obstacles
Left
Enlightenment
Come
Traditional
Regard

More quotes by Christopher Lasch

Image
The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction.
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
We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves.
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
Neoclassical economics insists that advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they don't already want to buy.
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
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
Image
The left no longer stands for common sense, as it did in the days of Tom Paine.
Christopher Lasch
Image
Adherents of the new religious right reject the separation of politics and religion, but they bring no spiritual insights to politics.
Christopher Lasch
Image
Environmentalism opposes reckless innovation and makes conservation the central order of business.
Christopher Lasch
Image
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.
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
Uprootedness uproots everything except the need for roots.
Christopher Lasch
Image
The work of art is a scream of freedom.
Christopher Lasch
Image
The left ask people to believe that there is no conflict between feminism and the family.
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
Make it new is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is largely a mirror image.
Christopher Lasch
Image
Relentless improvement of the product and upgrading of consumer tastes are the heart of mass merchandising.
Christopher Lasch
Image
The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction.
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