C. Wright Mills Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

To overcome the academic prose you have first to overcome the academic pose.

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.

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

Let every man be his own methodologist, let every man be his own theorist

Prestige is the shadow of money and power.

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

History is the shank of the social sciences.

The principal cause of war is war itself.

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

The mass production of distraction is now as much a part of the American way of life as the mass production of automobiles.

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

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

My plans have always exceeded my capacities and energies

The immediate cause of World War III is the military preparation of it.

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

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.

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

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

The very shaping of history now outpaces the ability of men to orient themselves in accordance with cherished values.

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

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

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.

[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.

As a proportion of the labor force, fewer individuals manipulate things, more handle people and symbols.

IBM Plus Reality Plus Humanism = Sociology.

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