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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

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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
Women
Firsts
Unfree
First
Rejecting
Much
Reject
Really
Rejects
Men
Belong
World
Clear
Free

More quotes by C. Wright Mills

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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
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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.
C. Wright Mills
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The immediate cause of World War III is the military preparation of it.
C. Wright Mills
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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.
C. Wright Mills
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Every revolution has its counterrevolution - that is a sign the revolution is for real.
C. Wright Mills
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The mass production of distraction is now as much a part of the American way of life as the mass production of automobiles.
C. Wright Mills
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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.
C. Wright Mills
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I try to be objective. I do not claim to be detached.
C. Wright Mills
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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.
C. Wright Mills
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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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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
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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.
C. Wright Mills
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All politics is a struggle for power the ultimate kind of power is violence.
C. Wright Mills
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Let every man be his own methodologist, let every man be his own theorist
C. Wright Mills
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IBM Plus Reality Plus Humanism = Sociology.
C. Wright Mills
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People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages.
C. Wright Mills
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Whatever sociology may be, it is the result of constantly asking the question, what is the meaning of this?
C. Wright Mills
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Prestige is the shadow of money and power.
C. Wright Mills
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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.
C. Wright Mills
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The very shaping of history now outpaces the ability of men to orient themselves in accordance with cherished values.
C. Wright Mills