Quotes by C. Wright Mills

About C. Wright Mills:

Charles Wright Mills is remembered for several books, among them The Power Elite, which introduced that term and describes the relationships and class alliances among the U.S. political, military, and economic elites; White Collar, on the American middle class; and The Sociological Imagination, where Mills proposes the proper relationship in sociological scholarship between biography and history.
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Those in authority within institutions and social structures attempt to justify their rule by linking it, as if it were a necessary consequence, with moral symbols, sacred emblems, or legal formulae which are widely believed and deeply internalized. ...

C. Wright Mills

Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.

C. Wright Mills

p5-what they need..is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves. It this this quality..what may ...

C. Wright Mills

the more aware they become,however vaugely,of ambitions & of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel.

C. Wright Mills

P6-the sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within sociey.

C. Wright Mills

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...

C. Wright Mills

Once war was considered the business of soldiers, international relations the concern of diplomats. But now that war has become seemingly total and seemingly permanent, the free sport of kings has become the forced and internecine business of people,...

C. Wright Mills

Perhaps J. P. Morgan did as a child have very severe feelings of inadequacy, perhaps his father did believe that he would not amount to anything; perhaps this did effect in him an inordinate drive for power for power’s sake. But all this would be q...

C. Wright Mills

In the world of the celebrity, the hierarchy of publicity has replaced the hierarchy of descent and even of great wealth.

C. Wright Mills

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

Power is not of a man. Wealth does not center in the person of the wealthy. Celebrity is not inherent in any personality. To be celebrated, to be wealthy, to have power requires access to major institutions.

C. Wright Mills

People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages.

C. Wright Mills

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

The nearest the modern general or admiral comes to a small-arms encounter of any sort is at a duck hunt in the company of corporation executives at the retreat of Continental Motors, Inc.

C. Wright Mills

Every revolution has its counterrevolution - that is a sign the revolution is for real.

C. Wright Mills

Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them -- and then, the opportun...

C. Wright Mills

Prestige is the shadow of money and power.

C. Wright Mills

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

The principal cause of war is war itself.

C. Wright Mills

Author Bio

  • NameC. Wright Mills
  • DescriptionAmerican sociologist
  • BornAugust 28, 1916
  • DiedMarch 20, 1962
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionSociologist
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship