Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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
Must
Germany
Conclude
Even
Although
Idiots
Men
Private
Altogether
Accept
Surprised
Citizens
Definition
Accepting
Greek
American
Idiot
Many
Definitions

More quotes by C. Wright Mills

Image
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
Image
To overcome the academic prose you have first to overcome the academic pose.
C. Wright Mills
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Prestige is the shadow of money and power.
C. Wright Mills
Image
IBM Plus Reality Plus Humanism = Sociology.
C. Wright Mills
Image
My plans have always exceeded my capacities and energies
C. Wright Mills
Image
I try to be objective. I do not claim to be detached.
C. Wright Mills
Image
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
Image
Fate has to do with events in history that are the summary and unintended results of innumerable decisions of innumerable men.
C. Wright Mills
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
C. Wright Mills
Image
The immediate cause of World War III is the military preparation of it.
C. Wright Mills
Image
Whatever sociology may be, it is the result of constantly asking the question, what is the meaning of this?
C. Wright Mills
Image
The means of effective communication are being expropriated from the intellectual worker.
C. Wright Mills
Image
All politics is a struggle for power the ultimate kind of power is violence.
C. Wright Mills
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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