 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. |
| The last three decades have seen the collapse of the family wage system. |
| The left sees nothing but bigotry and superstition in the popular defense of the family or in popular attitudes regarding abortion, crime, busing, and the school curriculum. |
| The left ask people to believe that there is no conflict between feminism and the family. |
| The conservative revival cannot be dismissed. |
| The hope of a new politics does not lie in formulating a left-wing reply to the right-it lies in rejecting conventional political categories. |
| Ideologies, however appealing, cannot shape the whole structure of perceptions and conduct unless they are embedded in daily experiences that confirm them. |
| The same historical development that turned the citizen into a client transformed the worker from a producer into a consumer. |
| Personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger. |
| The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction. |
| Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it. |
| Environmentalism opposes reckless innovation and makes conservation the central order of business. |
| George Orwell's contention was that it is a sure sign of trouble when things can no longer be called by their right names and described in plain, forthright speech. |
| Information, usually seen as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its by-product. |
| The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types. |
| A child's appetite for new toys appeal to the desire for ownership and appropriation: the appeal of toys comes to lie not in their use but in their status as possessions. |
| Most women are pragmatists who have allowed extremists on the left and right to manipulate the family issue for their own purposes. |
| Relentless improvement of the product and upgrading of consumer tastes are the heart of mass merchandising. |
| It is no longer an unwritten law of American capitalism that industry will attempt to maintain wages at a level that allows a single wage to support a family. |
| It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media. |
