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.

Because it equates tradition with prejudice, the left finds itself increasingly unable to converse with ordinary people in their common language.

The same historical development that turned the citizen into a client transformed the worker from a producer into a consumer.

Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure.

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

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

The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction.

Make it new is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is largely a mirror image.

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.

It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.

Personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger.