C. Wright Mills > Quotes

“Let every man be his own methodologist, let every man be his own theorist”
― C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination

“People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages.”
― Charles Wright Mills

“Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.”
― C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination

“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 opportunity to choose.”
― Charles 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, and that our personal experience is politically useless and our political will a minor illusion. Very often, the fear of total permanent war paralyzes the kind of morally oriented politics, which might engage our interests and our passions. We sense the cultural mediocrity around us-and in us-and we know that ours is a time when, within and between all the nations of the world, the levels of public sensibilities have sunk below sight; atrocity on a mass scale has become impersonal and official; moral indignation as a public fact has become extinct or made trivial.”
― C. Wright Mills, Letters and Autobiographical Writings

“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.”
― C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

“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, Character and Social Structure: Psychology of Social Institutions

“The idea that the millionaire finds nothing but a sad, empty place at the top of this society; the idea that the rich do not know what to do with their
money; the idea that the successful become filled up with futility, and that
those born successful are poor and little as well as rich - the idea, in short,
of the disconsolateness of the rich - is, in the main, merely a way by which
those who are not rich reconcile themselves to the fact. Wealth in America is
directly gratifying and directly leads to many further gratifications. To be
truly rich is to possess the means of realizing in big ways one's little whims
and fantasies and sicknesses....”
― C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

“Freedom is measured by the amount of control you have over the things upon which you are dependant.”
― 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, and diplomatic codes of honor between nations have collapsed. Peace in no longer serious; only war is serious. Every man and every nation is either friend or foe, and the idea of enmity becomes mechanical, massive, and without genuine passion. When virtually all negotiation aimed at peaceful agreement is likely to be seen as 'appeasement,' if not treason, the active role of the diplomat becomes meaningless; for diplomacy becomes merely a prelude to war an interlude between wars, and in such a context the diplomat is replaced by the warlord.”
― C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

“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 quite irrelevant had he been living in a peasant village in India in 1890. If we would understand the very rich we must first understand the economic and political structure of the nation in which they become the very rich.”
― Charles Wright Mills, The Power Elite

“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 be called the sociological imagination.”
― C.Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination

“P3- neither the life of an individual nor the history off a society can be understood without understanding both”
― C.Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination

“The very shaping of history now outpaces the ability of men to orient themselves in accordance with cherished values. Even when they do not panic men often sense that older ways off feeling and thinking have collapsed and that newer beginnings are ambiguous to the point of stasis.”
― C.Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination

“Xiii- men must...find their way from false to true consciousness, from their immediate to their real interest. They can do so only if they live in need of changing their way of life, of denying the positive, of refusing, it is precisely this need which the established society manages to repress using the scientific conquest of nature for the scientific conquest of man.

Xvi-the technological society is a system of domination.”
― C.Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination

“P6-the sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within sociey.”
― C.Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination

“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.”
― C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination

“p11- when people cherish some set of values and do not feel any threat to them they experience well being

12- we are frequently told that the problems of our decade.. have shifted from the external realm of economics and now have to do with the quality of individual life.”
― C.Wright Mills

“Those in the grip of the methodological inhibition often refuse to say anything about modern society unless it has been through the fine little mill of The Statistical Ritual. It is usual to say that what they produce is true even if unimportant. I do not agree with this; more and more I wonder how true it is. I wonder how much exactitude, or even pseudo-precision, is here confused with 'truth'; and how much abstracted empiricism is taken as the only 'empirical' manner of work.”
― C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination

“Nie można zrozumieć ani życia jednostki, ani życia społeczeństwa, nie odnosząc jednego do drugiego.”
― C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination

“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, The Power Elite

“p4- the history that now effects everyman is world history”
― C.Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination

“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, The Sociological Imagination

“In so far as he [sic] is concerned with liberal, that is to say liberating, education, his public role has two goals: What he ought to do for the individual is to turn personal troubles and concerns into social issues and problems open to reason – his aim is to help the individual become a self-educating man, who only then would be reasonable and free. What he ought to do for the society is to combat all those forces which are destroying genuine publics ... his aim is to help build and to strengthen self-cultivating publics.”
― C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination

“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, The Sociological Imagination

“When a society is industrialized, a peasant becomes a worker, a feudal lord is liquidated or becomes a businessman. When classes rise or fall a man is employed or unemployed; when the rate of investment goes up or down, a man takes new heart of goes broke. When wars happen, an insurance salesman becomes a rocket launcher; a store clerk, a radar ma; a wife lives alone; a child grows up without a father. Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding other. - pg 3”
― C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination

“Much that has passed for ‘science’ is now felt to be dubious philosophy; much that is held to be ‘real science’ is often felt to provide only confused fragments of the realities among which men live. Men of science, it is widely felt, no longer try to picture reality as a whole or to present a true outline of human destiny. Moreover, ‘science’ seems to many less a creative ethos and a manner of orientation than a set of Science Machines, operated by technicians and controlled by economic and military men who neither embody nor understand science as ethos and orientation. In the meantime, philosophers who speak in the name of science often transform it into ‘scientism,’ making out its experience to be identical with human experience, and claiming that only by its method can the problems of life be solved. With all this, many cultural workmen have come to feel that ‘science’ is a false and pretentious Messiah, or at the very least a highly ambiguous element in modern civilization.”
― C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination

“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.”
― C. Wright Mills

“To have mastered "method" and "theory" is to have become a self-conscious thinker, a man at work and aware of assumptions and the implications of whatever he is about. To be mastered by "method" or "theory" is simply to be kept from working, from trying, that is, to find out about something that is going on in the world.”
― C. Wright Mills - The Sociological Imagination (1959:120-121) as mentioned by Gerring (Social Scienc

“Yet men do not usually define the roubles they endure in terms of historical change and institutional contradiction. The well-being they enjoy, they do not usually impute to the big ups and downs of the societies in which they live. Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary men do not usually know what this connection means for the kinds of men they are becoming and for the kinds of history-making in which they take part. - pg 4”
― C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination