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
Every revolution has its counterrevolution - that is a sign the revolution is for real.
– C. Wright Mills
In the world of the celebrity, the hierarchy of publicity has replaced the hierarchy of descent and even of great wealth.
– C. Wright Mills
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
People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages.
– C. Wright Mills
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
Prestige is the shadow of money and power. Where these are, there it is. Like the national market for soap or automobiles and the enlarged arena of federal power, the national cash-in area for prestige has grown, slowly being consolidated into a truly national system.
– C. Wright Mills
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
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
The principal cause of war is war itself.
– C. Wright Mills
Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.