Christopher Lasch Quotes

The family is a haven in a heartless world.

Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.

The attempt to redefine the family as a purely voluntary arrangement grows out of the modern delusion that people can keep all their options open all the time.

We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves.

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

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.

The job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information.

Information, usually seen as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its by-product.

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.

Parents accept their obsolescence with the best grace they can muster. . . they do all they can to make it easy for the younger generation to surpass the older, while secretly dreading the rejection that follows.