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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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C. Wright Mills
Age: 45 †
Born: 1916
Born: August 28
Died: 1962
Died: March 20
Sociologist
University Teacher
Waco
Texas
Charles Wright Mills
Accept
Surprised
Citizens
Definition
Accepting
Greek
American
Idiot
Many
Definitions
Must
Germany
Conclude
Even
Although
Idiots
Men
Private
Altogether

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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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
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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.
C. Wright Mills
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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
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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To accept opinions is to gain the good solid feeling of being correct without having to think.
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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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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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
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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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I try to be objective. I do not claim to be detached.
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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Every revolution has its counterrevolution - that is a sign the revolution is for real.
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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IBM Plus Reality Plus Humanism = Sociology.
C. Wright Mills
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My plans have always exceeded my capacities and energies
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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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
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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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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