C. Wright Mills Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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One could translate the 555 pages of The Social System into about 150 pages of straightforward English. The result would not be very impressive.
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Most American men of affairs have learned well the rhetoric of public relations, in some cases even to the point of using it when they are alone, and thus coming to believe it.
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The family provides the army and navy with the best men and boys that it possesses. And, as we have seen, education and science too are becoming means to the ends sought by the military.
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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.
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In the world of the celebrity, the hierarchy of publicity has replaced the hierarchy of descent and even of great wealth.
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The ideals of liberalism have been divorced from any realities of modern social structure that might serve as the means of their realization. ... The detachment of liberalism from the facts of a going society make it an excellent mask for those who do not, cannot, or will not do what would have to be done to realize its ideals.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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In the formulas of 'personnel experts', men and women are to be shaped into the 'well rounded, acceptable, effective personality.' Just like small proprietors, they cannot higgle over prices, which are fixed, or 'judge the market' and accordingly buy wisely.
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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 . . .
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The mass production of distraction is now as much a part of the American way of life as the mass production of automobiles.
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Hegel is correct: we learn from history that we cannot learn from it.
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As a proportion of the labor force, fewer individuals manipulate things, more handle people and symbols.
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It is not characteristic of American executives to read books, except books on 'management' and mysteries. ... Those who who do venture into this arena ... are looked upon by their colleagues with mingled awe and incredulity.
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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.
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The more we understand what is happening in the world, the more frustrated we often become, for our knowledge leads to feelings of powerlessness. We feel that we are living in a world in which the citizen has become a mere spectator or a forced actor, and that our personal experience is politically useless and our political will a minor illusion.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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Fate has to do with events in history that are the summary and unintended results of innumerable decisions of innumerable men.