C. Wright Mills Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• To overcome the academic prose you have first to overcome the academic pose.

  C. Wright Mills

  Overcoming, Firsts, Academic

  C. Wright Mills (2000). “The Sociological Imagination”, p.219, Oxford University Press

  35 Copy quote

• In our time, what is at issue is the very nature of man, the image we have of his limits and possibilities as a man. History is not yet done with its exploration of the limits and meanings of human nature.

  C. Wright Mills

  Men, Issues, Curiosity

  C. Wright Mills (2000). “The Sociological Imagination”, p.171, Oxford University Press

  8 Copy quote

• The life-fate of the modern individual depends not only upon the family into which he was born or which he enters by marriage, but increasingly upon the corporation in which he spends the most alert hours of his best years.

  C. Wright Mills

  Fate, Years, Best Year

  C. Wright Mills (2000). “The Power Elite”, p.6, Oxford University Press

  4 Copy quote

• In the world of the celebrity, the hierarchy of publicity has replaced the hierarchy of descent and even of great wealth.

  C. Wright Mills

  World, Hierarchy, Publicity

  C. Wright Mills (2000). “The Power Elite”, p.73, Oxford University Press

  11 Copy quote

• Let every man be his own methodologist, let every man be his own theorist

  C. Wright Mills

  Men, Theorists, Every Man

  C. Wright Mills (2000). “The Sociological Imagination”, p.224, Oxford University Press

  25 Copy quote

• What one side considers a defense the other considers a threat. In the vortex of the struggle, each is trapped by his own fearful outlook and by his fear of the other; each moves and is moved within a circle both vicious and lethal.

  C. Wright Mills

  Struggle, Moving, Circles

  12 Copy quote

• To say that you can 'have experience,' means, for one thing, that your past plays into and affects your present, and that it defines your capacity for future experience. As a social scientist, you have to control this rather elaborate interplay, to capture what you experience and sort it out; only in this way can you hope to use it to guide and test your reflection, and in the process shape yourself as an intellectual craftsman

  C. Wright Mills

  Mean, Reflection, Past

  C. Wright Mills (2000). “The Sociological Imagination”, p.196, Oxford University Press

  23 Copy quote

• If you do not specify and confront real issues, what you say will surely obscure them. If you do not embody controversy, what you say will be an acceptance of the drift to the coming human hell.

  C. Wright Mills

  Real, Acceptance, Issues

  "The Marxists". Book by C. Wright Mills, 1962.

  33 Copy quote

• I try to be objective. I do not claim to be detached.

  C. Wright Mills

  Trying, Claims, Objectives

  20 Copy quote

• Any contemporary political re-statement of liberal and socialist goals must include as central the idea of a society in which all men would become men of substantive reason, whose independent reasoning would have structural consequences for their societies, its history and thus for their own life fates.

  C. Wright Mills

  Independent, Fate, Men

  "The Sociological Imagination". Book by C. Wright Mills, 1959.

  9 Copy quote

• What ordinary men are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited.

  C. Wright Mills

  Men, Vision, Trying

  C. Wright Mills (2000). “The Sociological Imagination”, p.3, Oxford University Press

  82 Copy quote

• Those in authority within institutions and social structures attempt to justify their rule by linking it, as if it were a necessary consequence, with moral symbols, sacred emblems, or legal formulae which are widely believed and deeply internalized. These central conceptions may refer to a god or gods, the 'votes of the majority,' the 'will of the people,' the 'aristocracy of talents or wealth,' to the 'divine right of kings' or to the alleged extraordinary endowment of the person of the ruler himself.

  C. Wright Mills

  Kings, Divine Right, People

  "Character and Social Structure". Book by C. Wright Mills, 1953.

  16 Copy quote

• What I am asserting is that in this particular epoch a conjunction of historical circumstances has led to the rise of an elite of power; that the men of the circles composing this elite, severally and collectively, now make such key decisions as are made; and that, given the enlargement and the centralization of the means of power now available, the decisions that they make and fail to make carry more consequences for more people than has ever been the case in the world history of mankind

  C. Wright Mills

  Mean, Men, Keys

  C. Wright Mills (2000). “The Power Elite”, p.28, Oxford University Press

  7 Copy quote

• Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.

  C. Wright Mills

  Technology, Media, Fiction

  C. Wright Mills (2002). “White Collar: The American Middle Classes”, p.333, Oxford University Press

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• For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an 'emergency' without a foreseeable end... such men as these are crackpot realists: in the name of realism they have constructed a paranoid reality all their own.

  C. Wright Mills

  Reality, Men, Talking

  "The Power Elite". Book by C. Wright Mills, 1956.

  13 Copy quote

• As a social and as a personal force, religion has become a dependent variable. It does not originate; it reacts. It does not denounce; it adapts. It does not set forth new models of conduct and sensibility; it imitates. Its rhetoric is without deep appeal; the worship it organizes is without piety. It has become less a revitalization of the spirit in permanent tension with the world than a respectable distraction from the sourness of life.

  C. Wright Mills

  Atheism, World, Variables

  12 Copy quote

• Prestige is the shadow of money and power. Where these are, there it is. Like the national market for soap or automobiles and the enlarged arena of federal power, the national cash-in area for prestige has grown, slowly being consolidated into a truly national system.

  C. Wright Mills

  Respect, Shadow, Cash

  C. Wright Mills (2000). “The Power Elite”, p.83, Oxford University Press

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• If we accept the Greek's definition of the idiot as an altogether private man, then we must conclude that many American citizens are now idiots. And I should not be surprised, although I don't know, if there were some such idiots even in Germany.

  C. Wright Mills

  Men, Greek, Definitions

  "Structure of Power in America". The British Journal of Sociology, Volume 9, March 1958.

  4 Copy quote

• Above all, do not give up your moral and political autonomy by accepting in somebody else's terms the illiberal practicality of the bureaucratic ethos or the liberal practicality of the moral scatter. Know that many personal troubles cannot be solved merely as troubles, but must be understood in terms of public issues and in terms of the problems of history making.

  C. Wright Mills

  Giving Up, Ethos, Issues

  C. Wright Mills (2000). “C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings”, p.2, Univ of California Press

  16 Copy quote

• The means of effective communication are being expropriated from the intellectual worker.

  C. Wright Mills

  Communication, Mean, Intellectual

  C. Wright Mills (2002). “White Collar: The American Middle Classes”, p.152, Oxford University Press

  7 Copy quote

• When white-collar people get jobs, they sell not only their time and energy, but their personalities as well. They sell by the week, or month, their smiles and their kindly gestures, and they must practice that prompt repression of resentment and aggression.

  C. Wright Mills

  Jobs, Practice, White

  C. Wright Mills (2002). “White Collar: The American Middle Classes”, p.17, Oxford University Press

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• Much work is merely a way to make money; much leisure is merely a way to spend it.

  C. Wright Mills

  Way, Leisure, Making Money

  5 Copy quote

• The principal cause of war is war itself.

  C. Wright Mills

  War, Causes, Causes Of War

  19 Copy quote

• The very shaping of history now outpaces the ability of men to orient themselves in accordance with cherished values.

  C. Wright Mills

  Men, Ability, Values

  C. Wright Mills (2000). “The Sociological Imagination”, p.4, Oxford University Press

  7 Copy quote

• The broadening of the economic order which came to be seated in the individual property owner... dramatized by Jefferson's purchase of the Louisiana Territory... "The supremacy of corporate economic power... consolidated by the Supreme Court decision of 1886 which declared that the Fourteenth Amendment protected the corporation... [the New Deal, leading to], within the political arena, as well as in the corporate world itself, competing centers of power that challenged those of the corporate directors.

  C. Wright Mills

  Order, Decision, Political

  "The Power Elite". Book by C. Wright Mills, 1956.

  12 Copy quote

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