Christopher Lasch Quotes

Culture is more important than politics.

Culture is your operating system.

Although, this is often used with negative connotations, I see ideology as an inherent part of culture.

Everything is arranged so that it be this way, this is what is called culture.

Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?

Customs form us all, our thoughts, our morals, our most fixed beliefs; are consequences of our place of birth.

Ideology... is indispensable in any society if men are to be formed, transformed and equipped to respond to the demands of their conditions of existence.

Thus a man was born into a fixed relation to certain gods as surely as he was born into a relation to his fellow-men; and his religion... was simply one side of the general scheme of conduct prescribed for him by his position as a member of society.

Culture is more important than politics and government.

I am fundamentally an anthropologist and a rationalist. What I say is that human societies are very different from what specialists call 'animal society' because the former have religion.

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance.

I think that a society cannot live without a certain number of irrational beliefs. They are protected from criticism and analysis because they are irrational.

Human paint, produce films and videos; they dance, dream and make music; they engage in political action, exchange goods, perform rituals, build houses start wars, act in plays, try to please patrons- and so on... They contain patterns, press the practitioners to "conform" and in this way mold their thought, their perception, their actions, and their discriminative abilities.

If you want to find out what it means to have a society without any rituals, read the New York Times.

If you ask a Saudi Imam why women in Saudi Arabia can't drive, he'll say, 'Because Islam demands it.' But that's absurd, because - first of all - Islam demands no such thing; and secondly, the only country in the world in which women can't drive is Saudi Arabia. The inability to understand the difference between a cultural practice and religious belief is shocking among self-described intellectuals.

Most conduct is guided by norms rather than by laws. Norms are voluntary and are effective because they are enforced by peer pressure.

What are all political and social institutions, but always a religion, which in realizing itself, becomes incarnate in the world?

Behavior, n. Conduct, as determined, not by principle, but by breeding.

Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves.

Anything you make forbidden gains sexual attractiveness. Would you be particularly interested in women's breasts if you lived in a society in which they were displayed at all times?

Sociology and anthropology are not disciplines which take easily to situations where people are able to live out their fantasies, not just in the symbolic action of ritual, but in the concrete theater of society at large.

A social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations.

Ideology is a certain unique experience of the universe and your place in it, to put it in standard terms, which serves the production of the existing power relations and blah blah blah.

The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.

Every society by its own practice of living and by the mode of relatedness, of feelings, and perceiving, develops a system of categories which determines the forms of awareness.