Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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.
C. Wright Mills
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
C. Wright Mills
Age: 45 †
Born: 1916
Born: August 28
Died: 1962
Died: March 20
Sociologist
University Teacher
Waco
Texas
Charles Wright Mills
Men
Limited
Powers
Aware
Private
Orbits
Ordinary
Bounded
Vision
Orbit
Live
Visions
Trying
Directly
More quotes by C. Wright Mills
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.
C. Wright Mills
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.
C. Wright Mills
Prestige is the shadow of money and power. Where these are, there it is. Like the national market for soap or automobiles and the enlarged arena of federal power, the national cash-in area for prestige has grown, slowly being consolidated into a truly national system.
C. Wright Mills
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
C. Wright Mills
The immediate cause of World War III is the military preparation of it.
C. Wright Mills
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.
C. Wright Mills
No one can be truly powerful unless he has access to the command of major institutions, for it is over these institutional means of power that the truly powerful are, in the first instance, truly powerful . . .
C. Wright Mills
Fate has to do with events in history that are the summary and unintended results of innumerable decisions of innumerable men.
C. Wright Mills
Every revolution has its counterrevolution - that is a sign the revolution is for real.
C. Wright Mills
Let every man be his own methodologist, let every man be his own theorist
C. Wright Mills
All politics is a struggle for power the ultimate kind of power is violence.
C. Wright Mills
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.
C. Wright Mills
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.
C. Wright Mills
IBM Plus Reality Plus Humanism = Sociology.
C. Wright Mills
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.
C. Wright Mills
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.
C. Wright Mills
To accept opinions is to gain the good solid feeling of being correct without having to think.
C. Wright Mills
People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages.
C. Wright Mills
To overcome the academic prose you have first to overcome the academic pose.
C. Wright Mills
I try to be objective. I do not claim to be detached.
C. Wright Mills
