Todd Gitlin Quotes

• My book is focused on the power of the American state, not least because the government of the United States governs so much that the case could be made that everybody around the world ought to have a vote in determining some of its policies.

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in America, Power

  Tags in Book

• Mills insisted that a sociologist’s proper subject was the intersection of biography and history.

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in History

• Like Americans, people outside America want fun, want an emotional compensation for the utilitarianism and calculation that mark the rest of their lives.

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in America

  Tags in Calculation

• It’s an old anarchist dream that people can take care of their own lives.

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in Dream

• I first came to think about media and politics in the late 1960s, having observed some distortions up close, but since then I wouldn’t say that my personal experience has remained an important motive for my writing about media.

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in Experience, Politics

  Tags in Important

• I don’t think anyone in the media thinks strategically about society.

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in Society

• I don’t for the life of me understand how anybody could contemplate the results of the 2000 election in the US and say that electoral politics doesn’t matter any more, and that Ralph Nader was right when he said there is no difference between the two parties.

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in Life, Politics

• I am concerned about how to reverse the process by which a fundamentalist right and a corporate elite were able to seize power in the United States.

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in Power

  Tags in Process

• I am a realist as well as an idealist, and I think that it is incumbent upon those of us in opposition to try to work within what are always arduous circumstances to stretch the limits of the possible.

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in Work

  Tags in Think, Limitation

• Human inertia makes the everyday environment, the furniture, as it were, appear to be a given.

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Human

• Collectively, we are in thrall to media – because they deliver to us many of the psychic goods we crave, and we know no other way to live.

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Media

• As I write at the end, if we step back and face the enormity of the torrent, then we have taken the first step to imagining what we might want to do about it.

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Write, End

• Americas are, for a variety of reasons, the most adept at producing the kind of entertainment that delivers easy satisfactions.

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in American, Satisfaction

• American movies and music deliver themes of freedom, innocence, and power that appeal to others – partly because America itself was put together out of a multiplicity of national traditions.

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in Country

  Tags in American

• All I will say is that there are particular features of the American constitutional system that renders a third party futile – at best.

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in American

• A century of convulsive change leaves huge demographic gouge marks.

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Century

Todd Gitlin (36)

Birth:	1943
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Author, Critic, Novelist, Professor, Sociologist, Writer

Related Authors

• Michael J. Tucker
• Violet Haberdasher
• Kele Moon
• Danielle Ackley-McPhail
• Harold Samuel Kushner
• Fran Drescher
• Harry Shearer
• Steve Maraboli
• Helen Caldicott
• Thomas Hughes

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 4th January

Births

• 1890 - Mordecai Wyatt Johnson
• 1962 - Peter Steele
• 1905 - Sterling Price Holloway Jr.
• 1896 - Everett McKinley Dirksen
• 1937 - Dyan Cannon

Deaths

• 1985 - Russell Page
• 1960 - Albert Camus
• 2001 - Les Brown
• 1965 - T. S. Eliot
• 1786 - Moses Mendelssohn