Todd Gitlin

If the Bible is a creation myth, it is an amorphous confusing one

— Todd Gitlin

The moguls are driven by their respective desires for profit - period.

— Todd Gitlin

“[I]n politics, reputation is the prologue to fact...”

— Todd Gitlin

My business is the analytical framework.

— Todd Gitlin

I don't think anyone in the media thinks strategically about society.

— Todd Gitlin

It's an old anarchist dream that people can take care of their own lives.

— Todd Gitlin

A century of convulsive change leaves huge demographic gouge marks.

— Todd Gitlin

We may repeat the awful revolutionary history of the 20th century because of the vulnerability of social movements to demagoguery.

— Todd Gitlin

The fancy term for what America has squandered in the past year and a half or so is legitimacy.

— Todd Gitlin

Like Americans, people outside America want fun, want an emotional compensation for the utilitarianism and calculation that mark the rest of their…

— Todd Gitlin

America is not just 'a nation with the soul of a church,' as G.K. Chesterton wrote in 1992: it is a nation…

— Todd Gitlin

Today's global justice movement may be the biggest, most diverse and energetic in history.

— Todd Gitlin

Human inertia makes the everyday environment, the furniture, as it were, appear to be a given.

— Todd Gitlin

Collectively, we are in thrall to media - because they deliver to us many of the psychic goods we crave, and we…

— Todd Gitlin

To win power anywhere you have to convince people that you can do something for them.

— Todd Gitlin

American movies and music deliver themes of freedom, innocence, and power that appeal to others - partly because America itself was put…

— Todd Gitlin

There is a fuzzy but real distinction that can and I believe should be made, between patriotism, which is attachment to a…

— Todd Gitlin

The only people available to change the world are the people now living in it, with all the beliefs they bring along…

— Todd Gitlin

I first came to think about media and politics in the late 1960s, having observed some distortions up close, but since then…

— Todd Gitlin

The manufacture of desire isn't at the heart - if it isn't absurd to speak of a heart - of the media…

— Todd Gitlin

The genius of the economic machine is in its ability to convert these indulgences into profitability. It converts desire into attention, a…

— Todd Gitlin

The mobilisation which Bush has been able to perform since 11 September 2001 has to be fought - at least by Americans…

— Todd Gitlin

My book is focused on the power of the American state, not least because the government of the United States governs so…

— Todd Gitlin

So American culture is itself a hybrid and lends itself to use in other people's hybrids.

— Todd Gitlin

As I write at the end, if we step back and face the enormity of the torrent, then we have taken the…

— Todd Gitlin

I am concerned about how to reverse the process by which a fundamentalist right and a corporate elite were able to seize…

— Todd Gitlin

Right now, we have no possibility of politics because we have a one-party state.

— Todd Gitlin

Some versions of patriotism come close to the tribal, which we all want to surpass, and some don't.

— Todd Gitlin

All I will say is that there are particular features of the American constitutional system that renders a third party futile -…

— Todd Gitlin

Mills insisted that a sociologist's proper subject was the intersection of biography and history.

— Todd Gitlin

My position is not that John Kerry is either Jesus Christ or the prophet Mohammad. My position is that John Kerry is…

— Todd Gitlin

Sure, I've often been misrepresented - anyone frequently quoted has this experience.

— Todd Gitlin

Americas are, for a variety of reasons, the most adept at producing the kind of entertainment that delivers easy satisfactions.

— Todd Gitlin

Navigation is power of a limited sort - it enables us to manage the immensity of the media torrent.

— Todd Gitlin

So every day I'm mindful as I watch the Bush crowd extend their sway into policies of every imaginable variety, and over…

— Todd Gitlin

I am a realist as well as an idealist, and I think that it is incumbent upon those of us in opposition…

— Todd Gitlin

Some fine day, Democrats may figure out how to get on the right side of the value divide - how to define…

— Todd Gitlin

I don't for the life of me understand how anybody could contemplate the results of the 2000 election in the US and…

— Todd Gitlin

Who of us does not recognize that the life we live, however larded with brave talk about values and thought and ideals,…

— Todd Gitlin