40+ Christopher Lasch Quotes On Religion, Education And Socialism

Christopher Lasch was an American historian, moralist, and social critic. He was best known for his critiques of progressivism, liberalism and the American mainstream left. Lasch's works, such as The Culture of Narcissism (1979) and Haven in a Heartless World (1977), were influential in the late 20th century. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Christopher Lasch on religion, life, education.

Top 10 Christopher Lasch Quotes

1. Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it.
2. Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
3. 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.
4. The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction.
5. 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.
6. The left has come to regard common sense - the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community - as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment.
7. Information, usually seen as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its by-product.
8. Because it equates tradition with prejudice, the left finds itself increasingly unable to converse with ordinary people in their common language.
9. Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all.
10. The job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information.

Christopher Lasch Short Quotes

• Personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger.
• The left ask people to believe that there is no conflict between feminism and the family.
• The work of art is a scream of freedom.
• Democracy in our time is more likely to die of indifference than of intolerance.
• The left has lost the common touch.
• We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change.
• It's not about winning. It's the enjoyment of doing it - it gets your brain going.
• Family is a haven in a heartless world.
• Uprootedness uproots everything except the need for roots.
• The conservative revival cannot be dismissed.

Christopher Lasch Quotes About Life

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

I despise the cowardly clinging to life, purely for the sake of life, that seems so deeply ingrained in the American temperament. — Christopher Lasch

The prison life of the past looks in our own time like liberation itself. — Christopher Lasch

It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times -- the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie -- seem attractive by comparison. — Christopher Lasch

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. — Christopher Lasch

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. — Christopher Lasch

We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves. — Christopher Lasch

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

Christopher Lasch Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Christopher Lasch

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

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. — Christopher Lasch

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. — Christopher Lasch

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. — Christopher Lasch

Instead of taking environmentalism away from the left, conservatives condemn it as a counsel of doom. — Christopher Lasch

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

The left has lost touch with popular opinion, thereby making it possible for the right to present itself as the party of common sense. — Christopher Lasch

The proper role of humanists is not to bring 'human values' to the attention of technicians otherwise engaged in a purely instrumental approach to their calling, but to demand the restoration of the practical or moral element in callings that have degenerated into techniques. — Christopher Lasch

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. The woman who rejects the stereotype of feminine weakness and dependence can no longer find much comfort in the clich? that all men are beasts. She has no choice except to believe, on the contrary, that men are human beings, and she finds it hard to forgive them when they act like animals. — Christopher Lasch

We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle-class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition. — Christopher Lasch

[Reinhold] Niebuhr endorsed G.K.Chesterton’s observation that tolerance is the attitude of those who do not believe in anything. — Christopher Lasch

Life Lessons by Christopher Lasch

1. Christopher Lasch taught that people should be mindful of the consequences of their actions, and strive to make decisions that benefit the greater good.
2. He also believed that people should strive to be independent from the powerful forces of society, and instead focus on creating meaningful relationships with those around them.
3. Lastly, he argued that people should take responsibility for their own lives, and strive to make their own decisions, rather than relying on external forces.