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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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C. Wright Mills
Age: 45 †
Born: 1916
Born: August 28
Died: 1962
Died: March 20
Sociologist
University Teacher
Waco
Texas
Charles Wright Mills
Powerful
Command
Means
Instance
Power
Majors
Firsts
Major
First
Access
Mean
Institutions
Truly
Unless
Institutional

More quotes by 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.
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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The means of effective communication are being expropriated from the intellectual worker.
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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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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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 overcome the academic prose you have first to overcome the academic pose.
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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To accept opinions is to gain the good solid feeling of being correct without having to think.
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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I try to be objective. I do not claim to be detached.
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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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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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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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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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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Fate has to do with events in history that are the summary and unintended results of innumerable decisions of innumerable men.
C. Wright Mills