Todd Gitlin Quotes

The moguls are driven by their respective desires for profit - period.

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

My business is the analytical framework.

Navigation is power of a limited sort - it enables us to manage the immensity of the media torrent.

A century of convulsive change leaves huge demographic gouge marks.

We may repeat the awful revolutionary history of the 20th century because of the vulnerability of social movements to demagoguery.

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

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.

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

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

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

The mobilisation which Bush has been able to perform since 11 September 2001 has to be fought - at least by Americans - in the name of a wise, honourable and democratic patriotism.

Today's global justice movement may be the biggest, most diverse and energetic in history.

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.

Some fine day, Democrats may figure out how to get on the right side of the value divide - how to define America as a place of the common good and not a playground of the strong.

To win power anywhere you have to convince people that you can do something for them.

So American culture is itself a hybrid and lends itself to use in other people's hybrids.

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.

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

Some versions of patriotism come close to the tribal, which we all want to surpass, and some don’t.

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

If the Bible is a creation myth, it is an amorphous confusing one

My position is not that John Kerry is either Jesus Christ or the prophet Mohammad. My position is that John Kerry is the possibility of restarting politics.

America is not just 'a nation with the soul of a church,' as G.K. Chesterton wrote in 1992: it is a nation with the mind of a crusade

Sure, I've often been misrepresented - anyone frequently quoted has this experience.

Right now, we have no possibility of politics because we have a one-party state.

Some versions of patriotism come close to the tribal, which we all want to surpass, and some don't.