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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.

C. Wright Mills

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C. Wright Mills
Age: 45 †
Born: 1916
Born: August 28
Died: 1962
Died: March 20
Sociologist
University Teacher
Waco
Texas
Charles Wright Mills
Government
Americans
Wishing
Issues
Cling
Economy
Disturbed
Sort
Competing
Moral
Machine
Interest
Interests
Balancing
Wish
Machines
Regulated
Political
Notion
Automatic

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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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What one side considers a defense the other considers a threat. In the vortex of the struggle, each is trapped by his own fearful outlook and by his fear of the other each moves and is moved within a circle both vicious and lethal.
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To accept opinions is to gain the good solid feeling of being correct without having to think.
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All politics is a struggle for power the ultimate kind of power is violence.
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The very shaping of history now outpaces the ability of men to orient themselves in accordance with cherished values.
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The immediate cause of World War III is the military preparation of it.
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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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IBM Plus Reality Plus Humanism = Sociology.
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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
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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.
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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. History is not yet done with its exploration of the limits and meanings of human nature.
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My plans have always exceeded my capacities and energies
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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.
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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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To overcome the academic prose you have first to overcome the academic pose.
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Every revolution has its counterrevolution - that is a sign the revolution is for real.
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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.
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Whatever sociology may be, it is the result of constantly asking the question, what is the meaning of this?
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If we accept the Greek's definition of the idiot as an altogether private man, then we must conclude that many American citizens are now idiots. And I should not be surprised, although I don't know, if there were some such idiots even in Germany.
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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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