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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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C. Wright Mills
Age: 45 †
Born: 1916
Born: August 28
Died: 1962
Died: March 20
Sociologist
University Teacher
Waco
Texas
Charles Wright Mills
Cherished
Ability
Values
History
Men
Orient
Shaping
Accordance

More quotes by 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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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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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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My plans have always exceeded my capacities and energies
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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To overcome the academic prose you have first to overcome the academic pose.
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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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 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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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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Prestige is the shadow of money and power.
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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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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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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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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The means of effective communication are being expropriated from the intellectual worker.
C. Wright Mills
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Every revolution has its counterrevolution - that is a sign the revolution is for real.
C. Wright Mills