"When liberals finally grasped the strength of popular feeling about the family, they cried to appropriate the rhetoric and symbolism of family values for their own purposes."

"Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure."

"Neoclassical economics insists that advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they don't already want to buy."

"The proper reply to right wing religiosity is not to insist that politics and religion don't mix. This is the stock response of the left."

"Adherents of the new religious right reject the separation of politics and religion, but they bring no spiritual insights to politics."

"Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success."

"Environmentalism opposes reckless innovation and makes conservation the central order of business."

"Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all."

"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."

"The left no longer stands for common sense, as it did in the days of Tom Paine."

"Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it."

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

"Conservatives unwittingly side with the social forces that contribute to the destruction of traditional values."

"The question of the family now divides our society so deeply that the opposing sides cannot even agree on a definition of the institution they are arguing about."

"Ideologies, however appealing, cannot shape the whole structure of perceptions and conduct unless they are embedded in daily experiences that confirm them."

"Information, usually seen as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its by-product."

"The family wage has been eroded by the same developments that have promoted consumerism as a way of life."

"Most women are pragmatists who have allowed extremists on the left and right to manipulate the family issue for their own purposes."

"The reporting of news has to be understood as propaganda for commodities, and events by images."

"Drugs are merely the most obvious form of addiction in our society. Drug addiction is one of the things that undermines traditional values."

"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."

"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."

"The left has lost touch with popular opinion, thereby making it possible for the right to present itself as the party of common sense."

"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."

"Most of these alternative arrangements, so-called, arise out of the ruins of marriages, not as an improvement of old fashioned marriage."

"The same historical development that turned the citizen into a client transformed the worker from a producer into a consumer."

"The news appeals to the same jaded appetite that makes a child tire of a toy as soon as it becomes familiar and demand a new one in its place."

"The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types."

"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."

"The left has come to regard common sense - the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community - as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment."

"Relentless improvement of the product and upgrading of consumer tastes are the heart of mass merchandising."

"The job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information."

"We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change."

"Traditionalists will have to master techniques of sustained activism formerly monopolized by the left."

"Personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger."

"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."

"Because it equates tradition with prejudice, the left finds itself increasingly unable to converse with ordinary people in their common language."

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

"Conservatives have no understanding of modern capitalism. They have a distorted understanding of the traditional values they claim to defend."

"Knowledge is what we get when an observer, preferably a scientifically trained observer, provides us with a copy of reality that we can all recognize."

"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."

"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."

"News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda."

"Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button."

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

"Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family; their defense of families carries no conviction."

"The conservative revival cannot be dismissed."

"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."

"Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice."