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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.

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

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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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News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda.
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Most of these alternative arrangements, so-called, arise out of the ruins of marriages, not as an improvement of old fashioned marriage.
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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.
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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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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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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I despise the cowardly clinging to life, purely for the sake of life, that seems so deeply ingrained in the American temperament.
Christopher Lasch
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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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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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Conservatives unwittingly side with the social forces that contribute to the destruction of traditional values.
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The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction.
Christopher Lasch
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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
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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.
Christopher Lasch
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Environmentalism opposes reckless innovation and makes conservation the central order of business.
Christopher Lasch
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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.
Christopher Lasch
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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.
Christopher Lasch
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The family is a haven in a heartless world.
Christopher Lasch