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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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C. Wright Mills
Age: 45 †
Born: 1916
Born: August 28
Died: 1962
Died: March 20
Sociologist
University Teacher
Waco
Texas
Charles Wright Mills
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Structural

More quotes by 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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My plans have always exceeded my capacities and energies
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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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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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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People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages.
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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Let every man be his own methodologist, let every man be his own theorist
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
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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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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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I try to be objective. I do not claim to be detached.
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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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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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
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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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IBM Plus Reality Plus Humanism = Sociology.
C. Wright Mills
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Fate has to do with events in history that are the summary and unintended results of innumerable decisions of innumerable men.
C. Wright Mills
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The immediate cause of World War III is the military preparation of it.
C. Wright Mills