In the world of the celebrity, the hierarchy of publicity has replaced the hierarchy of descent and even of great wealth. C. Wright Mills More Quotes by C. Wright Mills More Quotes From C. Wright Mills The means of effective communication are being expropriated from the intellectual worker. C. Wright Mills communication intellectual mean Much work is merely a way to make money; much leisure is merely a way to spend it. C. Wright Mills leisure making-money way 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 rome paris cities Here's to the day when the complete works of Leon Trotsky are published and widely distributed in the Soviet Union. On that day the USSR will have achieved democracy! C. Wright Mills leon unions democracy 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 belief christian men As a proportion of the labor force, fewer individuals manipulate things, more handle people and symbols. C. Wright Mills labor-force individual people Each day men sell little pieces if themselves in order to try to buy then back each night and weekend. C. Wright Mills weekend men night The economy - once a great scatter of small productive units in autonomous balance, has become dominated by two or three hundred giant corporations, administratively and politically interrelated... The political order, once a decentralized set of several dozen states with a weak spinal cord, has become a centralized executive establishment which has taken up into itself many powers previously scattered... The military order, once a slim establishment in a context of distrust fed by state militia, has become the largest and most expensive feature of government. C. Wright Mills government taken military 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 powerful mean firsts What I am asserting is that in this particular epoch a conjunction of historical circumstances has led to the rise of an elite of power; that the men of the circles composing this elite, severally and collectively, now make such key decisions as are made; and that, given the enlargement and the centralization of the means of power now available, the decisions that they make and fail to make carry more consequences for more people than has ever been the case in the world history of mankind C. Wright Mills keys men mean Prestige is the shadow of money and power. C. Wright Mills prestige shadow power 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 fate independent men My plans have always exceeded my capacities and energies C. Wright Mills plans energy capacity All politics is a struggle for power; the ultimate kind of power is violence. C. Wright Mills violence kind struggle The very shaping of history now outpaces the ability of men to orient themselves in accordance with cherished values. C. Wright Mills values ability men People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. C. Wright Mills advantage believe people As a social and as a personal force, religion has become a dependent variable. It does not originate; it reacts. It does not denounce; it adapts. It does not set forth new models of conduct and sensibility; it imitates. Its rhetoric is without deep appeal; the worship it organizes is without piety. It has become less a revitalization of the spirit in permanent tension with the world than a respectable distraction from the sourness of life. C. Wright Mills variables atheism world To have peace and not war, the drift toward a war economy, as facilitated by the moves and the demands of the sophisticated conservatives, must be stopped; to have peace without slump, the tactics and policies of the practical right must be overcome. The political and economic power of both must be broken. The power of these giants of main drift is both economically and politically anchored; both unions and an independent labor party are needed to struggle effective. C. Wright Mills party war moving 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 issues political government [O]ne could translate the 555 pages of The Social System into about 150 pages of straightforward English. The result would not be very impressive. C. Wright Mills results pages social
