C. Wright Mills Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Power is not of a man. Wealth does not center in the person of the wealthy. Celebrity is not inherent in any personality. To be celebrated, to be wealthy, to have power requires access to major institutions.

C. Wright Mills

#3. [A]s a proportion of the labor force, fewer individuals manipulate things , more handle people and symbols .

C. Wright Mills

#4. Here's to the day when the complete works of Leon Trotsky are published and widely distributed in the Soviet Union. On that day the USSR will have achieved democracy!

C. Wright Mills

#5. To accept opinions is to gain the good solid feeling of being correct without having to think.

C. Wright Mills

#6. Whatever sociology may be, it is the result of constantly asking the question, what is the meaning of this?

C. Wright Mills

#7. [O]ne could translate the 555 pages of The Social System into about 150 pages of straightforward English. The result would not be very impressive.

C. Wright Mills

#8. 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

#9. Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.

C. Wright Mills

#10. Not wishing to be disturbed over moral issues of the political economy, Americans cling to the notion that the government is a sort of automatic machine, regulated by the balancing of competing interests.

C. Wright Mills

#11. Each day men sell little pieces if themselves in order to try to buy then back each night and weekend.

C. Wright Mills

#12. The nearest the modern general or admiral comes to a small-arms encounter of any sort is at a duck hunt in the company of corporation executives at the retreat of Continental Motors, Inc.

C. Wright Mills

#13. P4- the history that now effects everyman is world history

C. Wright Mills

#14. 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

#15. Prestige is the shadow of money and power.

C. Wright Mills

#16. 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

#17. P5-what they need..is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves. It this this quality..what may be called the sociological imagination.

C. Wright Mills

#18. The more aware they become,however vaugely,of ambitions & of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel.

C. Wright Mills

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

C. Wright Mills

#20. You can never really understand an individual unless you also understand the society,historical time period in which they live,personal troubles, and social issues

C. Wright Mills

#21. P11- when people cherish some set of values and do not feel any threat to them they experience well being
12- we are frequently told that the problems of our decade.. have shifted from the external realm of economics and now have to do with the quality of individual life.

C. Wright Mills

#22. The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. This is its task and its promise.

C. Wright Mills

#23. To overcome the academic prose you have first to overcome the academic pose,

C. Wright Mills

#24. Nobody talks more of free enterprise and competition and of the best man winning than the man who inherited his father's store or farm.

C. Wright Mills

#25. Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary people do not usually know what this connection means for the kind of people they are becoming and for the kind of history-making in which they might take part.

C. Wright Mills

#26. All politics is a struggle for power; the ultimate kind of power is violence.

C. Wright Mills

#27. 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

#28. People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages.

C. Wright Mills

#29. The principal cause of war is war itself.

C. Wright Mills

#30. Fate has to do with events in history that are the summary and unintended results of innumerable decisions of innumerable men.

C. Wright Mills

#31. Let every man be his own methodologist, let every man be his own theorist

C. Wright Mills

#32. P6-the sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within sociey.

C. Wright Mills

#33. America is a nation with no truly national city, no Paris, no Rome, no London, no city which is at once the social center, the political capital, and the financial hub.

C. Wright Mills

#34. My plans have always exceeded my capacities and energies

C. Wright Mills

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

C. Wright Mills

#36. The market is sovereign and in the magic economy of the small entrepreneur there is no authoritarian center ... in the political sphere ... the equilibrium of powers prevails, and hence there is no chance of despotism.

C. Wright Mills

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

C. Wright Mills

#38. No one can be truly powerful unless he has access to the command of major institutions, for it is over these institutional means of power that the truly powerful are, in the first instance, truly powerful ...

C. Wright Mills

#39. The very shaping of history now outpaces the ability of men to orient themselves in accordance with cherished values. Even when they do not panic men often sense that older ways off feeling and thinking have collapsed and that newer beginnings are ambiguous to the point of stasis.

C. Wright Mills

#40. 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

#41. Every revolution has its counterrevolution - that is a sign the revolution is for real.

C. Wright Mills

#42. Freedom is measured by the amount of control you have over the things upon which you are dependant.

C. Wright Mills

#43. I try to be objective. I do not claim to be detached.

C. Wright Mills

#44. The truth about the nature and the power of the elite is not some secret which men of affairs know but will not tell. ... No matter how great their actual power, they tend to be less acutely aware of it than of the resistance of others to its use.

C. Wright Mills

#45. According to your belief [Christian clergy], my kind of man - secular, prideful, agnostic and all the rest of it - is among the damned. I'm on my own. You've got your God.

C. Wright Mills

#46. To really belong, we have got, first, to get it clear with ourselves that we do not belong and do not want to belong to an unfree world. As free men and women we have got to reject much of it and to know why we are rejecting it.

C. Wright Mills

#47. By the power elite, we refer to those political, economic, and military circles which as an intricate set of overlapping cliques share decisions having at least national consequences. In so far as national events are decided, the power elite are those who decide them.

C. Wright Mills

#48. Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them
and then, the opportunity to choose.

C. Wright Mills

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. History is the shank of the social sciences.

C. Wright Mills