119 Quotes by Christopher Lasch

It’s not about winning. It’s the enjoyment of doing it – it gets your brain going.

Unable to conceive of a God who does not regard human happiness as the be-all and end-all of creation, they cannot accept the central paradox of religious faith: that the secret of happiness lies in renouncing the right to be happy.

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.

The contemporary climate is therapeutic, not religious. People today hunger not for personal salvation, let alone for the restoration of an earlier golden age, but for the feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal well-being, health, and psychic security.

Every society reproduces its culture, its norms, its underlying assumptions, its modes of organizing experience – in the individual, in the form of personality.

Neoclassical economics insists that advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they don’t already want to buy.

The proper role of humanists is not to bring ‘human values’ to the attention of technicians otherwise engaged in a purely instrumental approach to their calling, but to demand the restoration of the practical or moral element in callings that have degenerated into techniques.

To live for the moment is the prevailing passion – to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity. We are fast losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future.

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.