C Wright Mills Inspirational Quotes (32)

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.

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 an unfree world. As free men and women we have got to reject much of it and to know why we are rejecting it.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Prestige is the shadow of money and power.