Christopher Lasch

The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction.

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

It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.

After all, we are not French and never can be, and any attempt to be so is to deny our inheritance and to try to impose upon ourselves a character that can be nothing but a veneer upon the surface.

Well, I actually wrote her a letter a couple of days ago congratulating her. The tone I tried to convey in the letter is, look, you are a part of a great American historical process.

Communism can't survive the captivating allure of capitalism.