C. Wright Mills Quotes

42 quotes in 874 categories

• 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…
• Prestige is the shadow of money and power.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• The professional celebrity, male and female, is the crowning result of the star system of a society that makes a fetish of competition. In America,…
• For we cannot adequately understand 'man' as an isolated biological creature, as a bundle of reflexes or a set of instincts, as an 'intelligible field'…
• What we experience in various and specific milieux, I have noted, is often caused by structural changes. Accordingly, to understand the changes of many personal…
• 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;…
• The principal cause of war is war itself.
• 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.
• 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.…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• According to your belief [Christian clergy], my kind of man — secular, prideful, agnostic and all the rest of it — is among the damned.…
• 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…
• People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy…

Browse C. Wright Mills Quotes by Category