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

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 last three decades have seen the collapse of the family wage system.

The intellectual debility of contemporary conservatism is indicated by its silence on all important matters.

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

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

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

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.

We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order.

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

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

Personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

The left has lost the common touch.

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

News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda.

Conservatives sense a link between television and drugs, but they do not grasp the nature of this connection.

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

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

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

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

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 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.

Make it new is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is largely a mirror image.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instead of taking environmentalism away from the left, conservatives condemn it as a counsel of doom.

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.

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 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 conservative revival cannot be dismissed.