Christopher Lasch Quotes

Anytime a movie or television show retreats into certain American pasts, I'm both annoyed and relieved.

The '60s are presented to kids today as a commodity.

What becomes fascinating is the way the culture industry doesn't deny it and doesn't try to mitigate it, but tries to sell its products as a way of liberating oneself.

I grew up thinking that it was immoral to idealize the past because, in the past, there was slavery and no penicillin.

We tend to paint the past only in extremes, as having been either categorically better than the present or irredeemably bad.

The counterculture is always repackaged and made into a product. It's part of America.

I joke that a person of color would never make a movie like 'Midnight in Paris.' Nostalgia isn't so enticing.

National Standards was not a narrative of past events but was leftwing revisionism and Political Correctness.

Since the 1960s, mainstream media has searched out and co-opted the most authentic things it could find in youth culture, whether that was psychedelic culture, anti-war culture, blue jeans culture. Eventually heavy metal culture, rap culture, electronica - they'll look for it and then market it back to kids at the mall.

It is the champions of "left wing liberal socialism" who shape the tendency towards falsifying the history of socialism. They try to make us believe that the country's past was nothing but mistakes and crimes, keeping silent about the greatest achievements of the past and the present.

My ancestors brought the cross to America and you have made a club of it.

We have no right to thrust our advanced views on our less advanced countrymen.

History, like beauty, depends largely on the beholder, so when you read that, for example, David Livingstone discovered the Victoria Falls, you might be forgiven for thinking that there was nobody around the Falls until Livingstone arrived on the scene

What can we expect from nations still less advanced in civilization than the [Ancient] Greeks?

Popular culture is inescapable in the U.S.

Every new generation of women, it seems, feminist and housewife alike, is encouraged by popular culture to disavow its forebears and rebrand itself as an all-new, never-before-seen generational phenomenon, completely different in every way from what came before. .... What's significant is that the cycle of idealization, devaluation, and revision gives an appearance of progress, of superficial change, that distracts us from the big picture.”

As a historian, I've spent much of my career warning people about the dangers of nostalgia.

I still remember with gratitude a series for children on everyday life where we learned about the games children in other times had played and the food they ate.

The fashion industry is an immense cultural and social blight that only gets a free pass because its would-be detractors are scared it'll start criticising their haircut.

As a country, we like to ignore our past. We don't like to look at it.

There is a recurring temptation for any nation, and for any writer who operates within its field of force, to make an ornament of the past: to turn the losses to victories and to restate humiliations as triumphs.

I was always obsessed with ancient Egypt, but any time you go back to wouldn't be as good for women as now - so it might be a quick visit.

Seriously, American pop culture must be the most predominant force on the planet, next to pollution and poverty.

I think pop culture has always influenced society.

We humans are still a very primitive culture, and it's one of the traps we've fallen into over the course of our lives - to forget our history. That's why George Orwell's 'Animal Farm' is so profound. It chronicles our short memory.