Christopher Lasch

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

Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.

In an individualistic culture, the narcissist is God's gift to the world. In a collectivist society, the narcissist is God's gift to the collective.

Propaganda in the ordinary sense of the term plays a less important part in a consumer society, where people greet all official pronouncements with suspicion.

A society that has made 'nostalgia' a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange quickly repudiates the suggestion that life in the past was in any important way better than life today.

The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction.

Drugs are merely the most obvious form of addiction in our society. Drug addiction is one of the things that undermines traditional values.

Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button.

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.

Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice.

Adherents of the new religious right reject the separation of politics and religion, but they bring no spiritual insights to politics.

Conservatives sense a link between television and drugs, but they do not grasp the nature of this connection.

Most of these alternative arrangements, so-called, arise out of the ruins of marriages, not as an improvement of old fashioned marriage.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The left ask people to believe that there is no conflict between feminism and the family.

The last three decades have seen the collapse of the family wage system.

Most women are pragmatists who have allowed extremists on the left and right to manipulate the family issue for their own purposes.