Christopher Lasch quotes

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Once women begin to question the inevitability of their subordination and to reject the conventions formerly associated with it, t... - MORE 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 cliché 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.
The job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information. The job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information.
It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times--the stupefaction of... - MORE 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.
Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure. - MORE Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure.
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 incre... - MORE 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.
The master propagandist, like the advertising expert, avoids obvious emotional appeals and strives for a tone that is consistent w... - MORE The master propagandist, like the advertising expert, avoids obvious emotional appeals and strives for a tone that is consistent with the prosaic quality of modern life--a dry, bland matter-of-factness. Nor does the propagandist circulate "intentionally biased" information. He knows that partial truths serve as more effective instruments of deception than lies. Then he tries to impress the public with statistics of economic growth that ne glect to give the base year from which the growth is calculated, with accurate but meaningless facts about the standard of living--with raw and uninterpreted data, in other words, from which the audience is invited to draw the inescapable conclusion that things are getting better and the present regime therefore deserves the people's confidence.... By using accurate details to imply a misleading picture of the whole, the artful propagandist, it has been said, makes truth the principal form of falsehood.
A society that has made "nostalgia" a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange quickly repudiates the suggestion that life in... - MORE 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.
Information, usually seen as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its by-product. Information, usually seen as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its by-product.
Knowledge is what we get when an observer, preferably a scientifically trained observer, provides us with a copy of reality that w... - MORE 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.
Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected aga... - MORE 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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