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C. Wright Mills

57 quotes

“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 (1916–1962) first seen 1948 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The New Men of Power (1948).
“The two greatest blinders of the intellectual who today might fight against the main drift are new and fascinating career chances, which often involve opportunities to practice his skill rather freely, and the ideology of liberalism, which tends to expropriate his chance to think straight. The two go together, for the liberal ideology, as now used by intellectuals, acts as a device whereby he can take advantage of the new career chances but retain the illusion that his soul remains his own.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) first seen 1948 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The New Men of Power (1948), p. 281.
“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 (1916–1962) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Structure of Power in America", The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 9 (March 1958).
“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. These central conceptions may refer to a god or gods, the 'votes of the majority,' the 'will of the people,' the 'aristocracy of talents or wealth,' to the 'divine right of kings' or to the alleged extraordinary endowment of the person of the ruler himself.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) first seen 1954 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Character & Social Structure (1954).
“In the United States… a handful of corporations centralize decisions and responsibilities that are relevant for military and political as well as economic developments of global significance. For nowadays the military and the political cannot be separated from economic considerations of power. We now live not in an economic order or a political order, but in a political economy that is closely linked with military institutions and decisions. This is obvious in the repeated "oil crisis" in the Middle East, or in the relevance of Southeast Asia and African resources for the Western powers…”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) first seen 1954 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Character & Social Structure (1954).
“[A]s a proportion of the labor force, fewer individuals manipulate things, more handle people and symbols.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In a society of employees dominated by the marketing mentality, it is inevitable that a personality market should arise. For in the great shift from manual skills to the art of 'handling', selling and servicing people, personal or even intimate traits of employees are drawn into the sphere of exchange and become commodities in the labor market.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Kindness and friendliness become aspects of personalized service or of public relations of big firms, rationalized to further the sale of something. With anonymous insincerity, the Successful Person thus makes an instrument of his own appearance and personality.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the formulas of 'personnel experts', men and women are to be shaped into the 'well rounded, acceptable, effective personality.' Just like small proprietors, they cannot higgle over prices, which are fixed, or 'judge the market' and accordingly buy wisely.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The point is that we are among those who cannot get their mouths around all the little Yeses that add up to tacit acceptance of a world run by crackpot realists and subject to blind drift. And that, you see, is something to which we do belong; we belong to those who are still capable of personally rejecting. Our minds are not yet captive.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The truth about the nature and the power of the elite is not some secret which men of affairs know but will not tell. ... No matter how great their actual power, they tend to be less acutely aware of it than of the resistance of others to its use.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most American men of affairs have learned well the rhetoric of public relations, in some cases even to the point of using it when they are alone, and thus coming to believe it.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People with advantages are loath 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.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The idea of the elite as composed of men and women having a finer moral character is an ideology of the elite.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hegel is correct: we learn from history that we cannot learn from it.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is not characteristic of American executives to read books, except books on 'management' and mysteries. ... Those who who do venture into this arena ... are looked upon by their colleagues with mingled awe and incredulity.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The market is sovereign and in the magic economy of the small entrepreneur there is no authoritarian center… in the political sphere… the equilibrium of powers prevails, and hence there is no chance of despotism.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The broadening of the economic order which came to be seated in the individual property owner… dramatized by Jefferson's purchase of the Louisiana Territory… "The supremacy of corporate economic power… consolidated by the Supreme Court decision of 1886 which declared that the Fourteenth Amendment protected the corporation… [the New Deal, leading to], within the political arena, as well as in the corporate world itself, competing centers of power that challenged those of the corporate directors.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The American elite does not have any real image of peace — other than as an uneasy interlude existing precariously by virtue of the balance of mutual fright. The only seriously accepted plan for peace is the full loaded pistol. In short, war or a high state of war-preparedness is felt to be the normal and seemingly permanent condition of the United States.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an 'emergency' without a foreseeable end,...Such men as these are crackpot realists: in the name of realism they have constructed a paranoid reality all their own.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“These men have replaced mind with platitude, and the dogmas by which they are legitimated are so widely accepted that no counterbalance of mind prevails against them. They have replaced the responsible interpretation of events with the disguise of events by a maze of public relations.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What the main drift of the twentieth century has revealed is that the economy has become concentrated and incorporated in the great hierarchies, the military has become enlarged and decisive to the shape of the entire economic structure; and moreover the economic and the military have become structurally and deeply interrelated, as the economy has become a seemingly permanent war economy; and military men and policies have increasingly penetrated the corporate economy.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The top of modern American society is increasingly unified and often seems wilfully co-ordinated: at the top there has emerged an elite of power.The middle levels are a drifting set of stalemated balancing forces: the middle does not link the bottom with the top.The bottom of this society is fragmented,and even as a passive fact,increasingly powerless:at the bottom there is emerging a mass society.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Without an industrial economy, the modern army, as in America, could not exist; it is an army of machines. Professional economists usually consider military institutions as parasitic upon the means of production. Now, however, such institutions have come to shape much of the economic life of the United States.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Religion, virtually without fail, provides the army at war with its blessings, and recruits from among its officials the chaplain, who in military costume counsels and consoles and stiffens the morale of men at war.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The family provides the army and navy with the best men and boys that it possesses. And, as we have seen, education and science too are becoming means to the ends sought by the military.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[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 (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is the political task of the social scientist — as of any liberal educator — continually to translate personal troubles into public issues, and public issues into the terms of their human meaning for a variety of individuals. It is his task to display in his work — and, as an educator, in his life as well — this kind of sociological imagination. And it is his purpose to cultivate such habits of mind among the men and women who are publicly exposed to him. To secure these ends is to secure reason and individuality, and to make these the predominant values of a democratic society.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One great lesson that we can learn from its systematic absence in the work of the grand theorists is that every self-conscious thinker must at all times be aware of — and hence be able to control — the levels of abstraction on which he is working. The capacity to shuttle between levels of abstraction, with ease and with clarity, is a signal mark of the imaginative and systematic thinker.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Above all, do not give up your moral and political autonomy by accepting in somebody else's terms the illiberal practicality of the bureaucratic ethos or the liberal practicality of the moral scatter. Know that many personal troubles cannot be solved merely as troubles, but must be understood in terms of public issues — and in terms of the problems of history making.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The ideals of liberalism have been divorced from any realities of modern social structure that might serve as the means of their realization. ... The detachment of liberalism from the facts of a going society make it an excellent mask for those who do not, cannot, or will not do what would have to be done to realize its ideals.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Liberal Values in the Modern World," in Power , Politics and People (1963), p. 189.
“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 (1916–1962) first seen 1962 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Foreword, The Marxists (1962).
“IBM Plus Reality Plus Humanism=Sociology”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Power, Politics, and People Boston: Beacon Press, (1963).
“Every revolution has its counterrevolution — that is a sign the revolution is for real. And every revolution must defend itself against this counterrevolution, or the revolution will fail.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Listen Yankee (1960), pp. 54.
“We know well that all new cultural beginnings today must be part of world culture; that no truly intellectual life can occur if the mind is restricted; that no art can have genuine and everlasting value if it is not in a universal language. East and West. God knows there is enough restriction. Enough laziness of stereotypes. Smash them, we say to ourselves. And the only way to do that is to open up a true world forum that is absolutely free.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Listen Yankee (1960), pp. 144-145.
“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 (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Mills was invited to speak in the Soviet Union as an honored guest, due to his criticisms of economies in the West; he was asked to make a toast at a banquet, and in his contrarian way, toasted Trotsky, whose works had …
“For the corporation executives, the military metaphysic often coincides with their interest in a stable and planned flow of profit; it enables them to have their risk underwritten by public money; it enables them reasonably to expect that they can exploit for private profit now and later, the risky research developments paid for by public money. It is, in brief, a mask of the subsidized capitalism from which they extract profit and upon which their power is based.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“An expensive arms race, under cover of the military metaphysic, and in a paranoid atmosphere of fright, is an economically attractive business. To many utopian capitalists, it has become the Business Way of American Life.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Some men want war for sordid, others for idealistic, reasons; some for personal gain, others for impersonal principle. But most of those who consciously want war and accept it, and so help to create its "inevitability," want it in order to shift the locus of their problems.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They know of no solutions to the paradoxes of the Middle East and Europe, the Far East and Africa except the landing of Marines. Being baffled, and also being very tired of being baffled, they have come to believe that there is no way out—except war—which would remove all the bewildering paradoxes of their tedious and now misguided attempts to construct peace. In place of these paradoxes they prefer the bright, clear problems of war—as they used to be. For they still believe that "winning" means something, although they never tell us what.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The first rule for understanding the human condition is that men live in second-hand worlds. They are aware of much more than they have personally experienced; and their own experience is always indirect.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Moral distrust of men in public life is an old American convention. In the current campaign, however, it has reached unprecedented heights: each of the leading candidates has felt it necessary to make public an accounting of his personal income.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Laws without supporting moral conventions invite crime, but much more importantly, they spur the growth of an expedient, amoral attitude. In our kind of society - with its absence of pre-capitalist traditions - the only way to do away with training devices is to change the laws and their enforcement so that, unlike the current income tax, they do not depend upon individual integrity. Another way is to pass only laws that result from great social movements with concomitant changes in moral codes, but there is no such movement underway in any area of American society today.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When ever the standards of the moneyed life prevail, the man with money, no matter how he got it, will eventually be respected.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In a society which the money-makers have had no serious rival for repute and honor, the word "practical" comes to mean useful for private gain, and "common sense," the sense to get ahead financially. The pursuit of the moneyed life is the commanding value, in relation to which the influence of others values has declined, so men eas**"Diagnosis of Our Moral Uneasiness", III”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Today in the United States there is no Left: practical political activities are monopolized by an irresponsible two-party system; cultural activities - although formally quite free - tend to become nationalist or commercial or mere private. Today in Western Europe what remains of the older Left is weak; its remnants have become inconsequential as a cultural and political center of insurgent opposition. "The Left" has indeed become "established." Even if the Left wins state power, as in Britain, it often seems to its members to have little room for maneuver - in he world or in the nation.”
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source