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.

You've gotta be very careful that grace and politeness do not merge into a banality of behavior, where we're just nice, sort of 'death by cupcake.'

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.

Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects, and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of colour. Imagine a world before the 'beginning was the word.'