84 Quotes by C. Wright Mills

Among the means of power that now prevail is the power to manage and to manipulate the consent of men. That we do not know the limits of such power—and that we hope it does have limits—does not remove the fact that much power today is successfully employed without the sanction of the reason or the conscience of the obedient.

Nie można zrozumieć ani życia jednostki, ani życia społeczeństwa, nie odnosząc jednego do drugiego.

What I have been trying to say to intellectuals, preachers, scientists- as well as more generally to publics- can be put into one sentence: drop the liberal rhetoric and the conservative default; they are now parts of one and the same official line; transcend that line.

If we accept the Greek’s definition of the idiot as an altogether private man, then we must conclude that many citizens of many societies are indeed idiots.

Wiele ważnych problemów publicznych, podobnie jak wiele prywatnych kłopotów, opisuje się w kategoriach „psychiatrycznych” – często, jak się wydaje, w żałosnej próbie ucieczki przed wielkimi problemami i pytaniami nowoczesnego społeczeństwa.

My conception stands opposed to social science as a set of bureaucratic techniques which inhibit social inquiry by ‘methodolocigal’ pretentions, which congest such work by obscurantist conceptions, or which trivialize it by concern with minor problems unconnected with publicly relevant issues.

People with advantages are loathe to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves.

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

Sometimes, by the way, you may find that a book does not really have any themes. It is just a string of topics, surrounded, of course, by methodological introductions to methodology, and theoretical introductions to theory. These are quite indispensable to the writing of books by men without ideas. And so is lack of intelligibility.