Christopher Lasch

Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.

Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button.

The left has come to regard common sense - the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community - as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment.

Most of these alternative arrangements, so-called, arise out of the ruins of marriages, not as an improvement of old fashioned marriage.

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.

The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types.

The left ask people to believe that there is no conflict between feminism and the family.

The family wage has been eroded by the same developments that have promoted consumerism as a way of life.

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.

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

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.

Man__ collective mastery of nature_ even if we could ignore the mounting evidence that this too is largely an illusion_ can hardly be expected to confer a sense of confidence and well- being when it coexists with centralizing forces that have deprived individuals of any mastery over the concrete, immediate conditions of their existence. The collective control allegedly conferred by science is an abstraction that has little resonance in everyday life.

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.