Christopher Lasch Quotes

The intellectual debility of contemporary conservatism is indicated by its silence on all important matters.

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

The conservative revival cannot be dismissed.

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

Personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger.

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.

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.

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

Ideologies, however appealing, cannot shape the whole structure of perceptions and conduct unless they are embedded in daily experiences that confirm them.

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

Traditionalists will have to master techniques of sustained activism formerly monopolized by the left.

Democracy in our time is more likely to die of indifference than of intolerance.

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.

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

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

The left has lost the common touch.

We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change.

Uprootedness uproots everything except the need for roots.

It's not about winning. It's the enjoyment of doing it - it gets your brain going.