Christopher Lasch
  • The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction.

  • In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs.

  • 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.

  • Propaganda in the ordinary sense of the term plays a less important part in a consumer society, where people greet all official pronouncements with suspicion.

  • In an individualistic culture, the narcissist is God's gift to the world. In a collectivist society, the narcissist is God's gift to the collective.