 Neoclassical economics insists that advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they don't already want to buy. |
| The job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information. |
| Conservatives have no understanding of modern capitalism. They have a distorted understanding of the traditional values they claim to defend. |
| The attempt to redefine the family as a purely voluntary arrangement grows out of the modern delusion that people can keep all their options open all the time. |
| Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family; their defense of families carries no conviction. |
| In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs. |
| Adherents of the new religious right reject the separation of politics and religion, but they bring no spiritual insights to politics. |
| Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button. |
| Progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order. |
| Traditionalists will have to master techniques of sustained activism formerly monopolized by the left. |
| The reporting of news has to be understood as propaganda for commodities, and events by images. |
| The family wage has been eroded by the same developments that have promoted consumerism as a way of life. |
| It is the logic of consumerism that undermines the values of loyalty and permanence and promotes a different set of values that is destructive of family life. |
| The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction. |
| Conservatives unwittingly side with the social forces that contribute to the destruction of traditional values. |
| A growing awareness of the depth of popular attachment to the family has led some liberals to concede that family is not just a buzzword for reaction. |
| Make it new is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is largely a mirror image. |
| Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success. |
| Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all. |
| Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice. |
