Christopher Lasch

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

— 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

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

— 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

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

Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it.

— Christopher Lasch