Top 100 C.d. Wright Quotes
#1. Being told that he was immune to flattery was the nicest thing he had heard someone say about him in a long time.
John C. Wright
#2. 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
#3. Montrose decided then and there that a full library, one made of old-fashioned paper books with bindings, the kind that cannot be electronically re-edited by anonymous lines of hidden code, was just as much a necessity for a free man as a shooting iron or a printing press.
John C. Wright
#4. The pride of young men requires that they seem wise, despite their inexperience, and the only way to appear all-knowing without going to the tedium of acquiring knowledge, is to hold all knowledge in weary-seeming contempt.
John C. Wright
#5. 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
#6. [A]s a proportion of the labor force, fewer individuals manipulate things , more handle people and symbols .
C. Wright Mills
#7. 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
#8. The second kind you make yourself. Most people, most of their lives, most of their problems, they simply invite into their lives, sweep out a guestroom for each pain, and give it free lodging and board.
John C. Wright
#9. To accept opinions is to gain the good solid feeling of being correct without having to think.
C. Wright Mills
#10. The second kind are invited by bad character, and the problems such a person has then cannot be put right until he puts himself right. It is not something a proud man can do, because proud men see no wrongness in themselves.
John C. Wright
#11. Here is our first rule: Any life you create is yours, and must be cared for. No matter how humble or small, it is still yours, and you must answer for it.
John C. Wright
#12. Whatever sociology may be, it is the result of constantly asking the question, what is the meaning of this?
C. Wright Mills
#13. [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
#14. Even though I'm a realist, I try to let the medium show and allow it a certain degree of freedom.
William C. Wright
#15. 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
#16. Readers have to be sought out and won to the light of the page, poem by poem, one by one by one.
C.D. Wright
#17. Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.
C. Wright Mills
#18. I believe the word used wrongly distorts the world.
C.D. Wright
#19. Truth destroys the worst in man; pleasure destroys the best. If you love truth more than happiness, then open; otherwise, let rest." His
John C. Wright
#20. I did not call for the extermination of people, but of ideas.
John C. Wright
#21. The process of thinking itself requires us to view the universe in the direction of entropy, since an abstraction always involves information loss, since symbols 'abstract' complexity from observed objects.
John C. Wright
#22. The artistic reward for refuting the received national tradition is liberation. The price is homelessness. Interior exile.
C.D. Wright
#23. And therefore a giant hammer of pure stupidity lashed out of the screen and felled me again. I lay mewling, clutching my head with my sweaty hands, whimpering for my Mommy to make it stop. MAKE IT STOP!
But it did not stop. It. Did. Not. Stop.
The Desolation of Tolkien
John C. Wright
#24. 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
#25. The Wright brothers' first flight was shorter than a Boeing 747's wing span. We've just begun with heart transplants.
C. Walton Lillehei
#26. In my story I do not deal in Absolute Evil. I do not think there is such a thing, since that is Zero. - The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, no. 183
John C. Wright
#27. Each day men sell little pieces if themselves in order to try to buy then back each night and weekend.
C. Wright Mills
#28. No morally imperfect human being(s), born into "the double darkness of sin and ignorance" could ever qualify for the position of Master Utilitarian Manipulator that Consequentialism needs to be put into practice.
John C. Wright
#29. 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
#30. P4- the history that now effects everyman is world history
C. Wright Mills
#31. If people are not making mistakes, they are not trying new things. If they are making the same mistake twice, they are not learning new things!
Walter C. Wright
#32. 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
#33. Humanity one chooses. Men who choose inhumanity are merely upright beasts.
John C. Wright
#35. 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
#36. Human nature, for better or worse, always eventually comes to the fore again. And human nature likes and needs stories that are stories.
John C. Wright
#37. Penny was a very pretty, witty and brave girl, as bold as a Marine platoon storming Iwo Jima.
John C. Wright
#38. 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
#39. My mom once told me, back when I was a kid, that I would never understand girls unless I understood the fear of being lonely and alone. She said no girl would ever understand boys unless she understood the fear of being dishonored and defeated.
John C. Wright
#40. 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
#41. The means of effective communication are being expropriated from the intellectual worker.
C. Wright Mills
#43. 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
#44. A philosopher goes where the truth leads and has no patience with mere emotion.
John C. Wright
#45. 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
#46. Poetry seems especially like nothing else so much as itself. Poetry is not like, it is the very lining of the inner life.
C.D. Wright
#47. 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
#48. To overcome the academic prose you have first to overcome the academic pose,
C. Wright Mills
#49. Almost none of the poetries I admire stick to their labels, native or adopted ones. Rather, they are vagrant in their identifications. Tramp poets, there you go, a new label for those with unstable allegiances.
C.D. Wright
#50. 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
#51. As C. S. Lewis said in a famous lecture, next to the sacrament itself your Christian neighbor is the holiest object ever presented to your sight, because in him or her the living Christ is truly present.3
N. T. Wright
#52. Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.
C.D. Wright
#53. Pain has a funny way of focusing the mind. Only what hurts matters.
John C. Wright
#54. The first kind builds character. You cannot grow without this kind of problem, any more than you can build muscles without exercise.
John C. Wright
#55. 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
#56. So it is not the danger that creeps people out. It is something else. Something uncanny. An aura of madness. Even with his face hidden, I could see Enmeduranki had it.
John C. Wright
#57. If religion, she also liked to say, is the opiate of the masses, fundamentalism is the amphetamine.
C.D. Wright
#58. All politics is a struggle for power; the ultimate kind of power is violence.
C. Wright Mills
#59. 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
#60. People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages.
C. Wright Mills
#61. We call it Albion. It is the English-speaking world. The one where they kill babies in the womb, right? And here I was hoping we'd be famous for the Moonshot, or democracy, or the Beatles, or something.
John C. Wright
#63. Vows are powerful things," he said. "They set things in motion.
John C. Wright
#64. Fate has to do with events in history that are the summary and unintended results of innumerable decisions of innumerable men.
C. Wright Mills
#65. A wasteland is a confrontation to a man of stature: an empty place, a gauntlet thrown down in challenge and defiance. A place like that cries out to be conquered and civilised.
John C. Wright
#66. Everybody is different. Some comedy is more musical like Steven Wright. His is a pillar of comedy to me. He invented a whole form and all his jokes are poems. So it's different. I wanted to do it like George Carlin. Now I do it like me.
Louis C.K.
#67. Let every man be his own methodologist, let every man be his own theorist
C. Wright Mills
#68. When power is the only coin, they said, you have nothing left to sell but your soul.
John C. Wright
#69. P6-the sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within sociey.
C. Wright Mills
#70. 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
#71. My plans have always exceeded my capacities and energies
C. Wright Mills
#72. A sane accusation can be refuted. An insane accusation, one that makes no sense on any level, cannot be refuted, cannot even be addressed, because it is insolent nonsense. There is no sober way to defend oneself from the accusation of being a one-eyed one-horned flying purple people eater.
John C. Wright
#73. Son, different rules apply during the End of the World. I did not know what to say to that.
John C. Wright
#74. In the world of the celebrity, the hierarchy of publicity has replaced the hierarchy of descent and even of great wealth.
C. Wright Mills
#75. Even a prison the size of a universe is still a prison. And it is every prisoner's duty to escape.
John C. Wright
#76. If the incision of our words amounts to nothing but a feeling, a slow motion, it will still cut a better swath than the factory model, the corporate model, the penitentiary model, which by my lights are one and the same.
C.D. Wright
#77. On THE AMBER SPYGLASS:
If this plotline was a motorist, it would have been arrested for driving while intoxicated, if it had not perished in the horrible drunk accident where it went headlong over the cliff of the author's preachy message, tumbled down the rocky hillside, crashed, and burned.
John C. Wright
#78. That's not fair! You can't talk back to the Tales! They are all we have!
John C. Wright
#79. For as 'Wright's Ninth Rule of Writing' states, every story teaches a moral, whether intended by the author or not.
John C. Wright
#80. 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
#81. Much work is merely a way to make money; much leisure is merely a way to spend it.
C. Wright Mills
#82. The ability to do this so quickly was largely due to the enthusiastic and efficient services of Mr. C.E. Taylor, who did all the machine work in our shop for the first as well as the succeeding experimental machines.
Orville Wright
#83. I can't wait to get my memory back. It sounds like I am a really cool person
John C. Wright
#84. 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
#85. If atheism solved all human woe, then the Soviet Union would have been an empire of joy and dancing bunnies, instead of the land of corpses.
John C. Wright
#86. D.C. is more corrupt than Hollywood. It really is.
Robin Wright
#87. Apparently these new rulers of the world did not indulge in any drinking or smoking to soften their moods when they met, which Menelaus knew to be a big mistake. The Congress of the United States, back before the Disunion, always met sober, and look at what had come of that.
John C. Wright
#88. 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
#89. Euryphaean, and the music of an instrument called a pianoforte, infinite resistance coil and the sanity glass, and all the inventions that sprang from
John C. Wright
#91. 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
#92. Truth does not become more or less true, whether those who know it are many or few.
John C. Wright
#93. My still-life painting has more to do with light and shadow than with the objects themselves.
William C. Wright
#94. I am suggesting that the radical of poetry lies not in the
resolution of doubts but in their proliferation
C.D. Wright
#95. Lead me, guide me to the light of your paper. Keep me in your arc of acuity. And when the ream is spent. Write a poem on my back. I'll never wash it off.
C.D. Wright
#96. Uniformity, in its motives, its goals, its far-ranging consequences, is the natural enemy of poetry, not to mention the enemy of trees, the soil, the exemplary life therein.
C.D. Wright
#98. Having been born and raised in Washington, D.C., you kind of absorb politics when you grow up. And it continues to be a focus of mine, probably more than what is healthy for me.
Jeffrey Wright
#99. It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free, and declare them so.
C.D. Wright
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