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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
History
Men
Orient
Shaping
Accordance
Cherished
Ability
Values

More quotes by 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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To accept opinions is to gain the good solid feeling of being correct without having to think.
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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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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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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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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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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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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IBM Plus Reality Plus Humanism = Sociology.
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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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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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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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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Prestige is the shadow of money and power.
C. Wright Mills
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The immediate cause of World War III is the military preparation of it.
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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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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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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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