C. Wright Mills Quotes

• Prestige is the shadow of money and power.

  C. Wright Mills

  Topics in Money, Power

  Tags in Prestige

• If everything is caused by innumerable ‘factors,’ then we had best be very careful in any practical actions we undertake. We must deal with many details, and so it is advisable to proceed to reform this little piece and see what happens, before we reform that little piece too.

  C. Wright Mills

  Topics in Uncategorized

• In so far as the family as an institution turns women into darling little slaves and men into their chief providers and unweaned dependents, the problem of a satisfactory marriage remains incapable of purely private solution.

  C. Wright Mills

  Topics in Uncategorized

• No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history and of their intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey.

  C. Wright Mills

  Topics in Uncategorized

• When white-collar people get jobs, they sell not only their time and energy, but their personalities as well. They sell by week, or month, their smiles and their kindly gestures, and they must practise prompt repression of resentment and aggression.

  C. Wright Mills

  Topics in Work

  Tags in People

• The life-fate of the modern individual depends not only upon the family into which he was born or which he enters by marriage, but increasingly upon the corporation in which he spends the most alert hours of his best years.

  C. Wright Mills

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Corporation

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

  C. Wright Mills

  Topics in History, Society

  Tags in Understanding

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in American, Moral

• Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.

  C. Wright Mills

  Topics in Technology

  Tags in Commercial, Cultural

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Wealth, Celebrity

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in American, Political

• The professional celebrity, male and female, is the crowning result of the star system of a society that makes a fetish of competition. In America, this system is carried to the point where a man who can knock a small white ball into a series of holes in the ground with more efficiency than anyone else thereby gains social access to the President of the United States.

  C. Wright Mills

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Celebrity, American

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

  C. Wright Mills

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Celebrity, Wealth

• 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

  Topics in Vision

  Tags in Men

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

  C. Wright Mills

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Advantage

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Company

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

  C. Wright Mills

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Revolution

• The principal cause of war is war itself.

  C. Wright Mills

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in War, Principal

• 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.

  C. Wright Mills

  Topics in Opportunity

  Tags in Freedom, Choice, Choosing

• Society’s limit on achievement is the glass ceiling that gives a resting point for those who fail to have their achievements defined by others.

  Calum Ross

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Motivation

C. Wright Mills (20)

Birth:	28th August, 1916
Death:	20th March, 1962
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Author, Professor, Sociologist

About

Charles Wright Mills was born in Waco, Texas. He was an American sociologist, and a professor of sociology at Columbia University from 1946 until his death in 1962. Mills was published widely in popular and intellectual journals, and 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. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1939 with a bachelor's degree in sociology and a master's degree in philosophy. Mills received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1942.

Related Authors

• Andrew Grove
• Isaac Bashevis Singer
• Milovan Dilas
• Tobias George Smollett
• Rachel Hall
• Lauren DeStefano
• Morton Hunt
• Angelo M. Swinson
• William Safire
• Mark Gungor

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 21st November

Births

• 1962 - Steven Curtis Chapman
• 1870 - Alexander Berkman
• 1937 - Marlo Thomas
• 1929 - Marilyn French
• 1953 - Tina Brown

Deaths

• 1922 - Ricardo Flores Magon
• 1945 - Robert Benchley
• 1959 - Max Baer
• 1999 - Quentin Crisp
• 2000 - Sir Cyril Astley Clarke