Benjamin Silliman
early American chemist and science educator (1779-1864)
C. Wright Mills
American sociologist (1916-1962)
Charles Wright Millswas an American sociologist, and a professor of sociology at Columbia University from 1946 until his death in 1962. Mills published widely in both popular and intellectual journals, and is remembered for several books, such as The Power Elite, White Collar: The American Middle Classes, and The Sociological Imagination.
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Occupation
About the C. Wright Mills
Charles Wright Millswas an American sociologist, and a professor of sociology at Columbia University from 1946 until his death in 1962. Mills published widely in both popular and intellectual journals, and is remembered for several books, such as The Power Elite, White Collar: The American Middle Classes, and The Sociological Imagination. Mills was concerned with the responsibilities of intellectuals in post-World War II society, and he advocated public and political engagement over disinterested observation. One of Mills’s biographers, Daniel Geary, writes that Mills’s writings had a “particularly significant impact on New Left social movements of the 1960s era.” It was Mills who popularized the term New Left in the U.S. in a 1960 open letter, “Letter to the New Left”.
11 Quotes by C. Wright Mills
- 1.
In the world of the celebrity, the hierarchy of publicity has replaced the hierarchy of descent and even of great wealth.
C. Wright MillsAmerican sociologist (1916-1962)
- 2.
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 MillsAmerican sociologist (1916-1962)
- 3.
Prestige is the shadow of money and power.
C. Wright MillsAmerican sociologist (1916-1962)
- 4.
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 MillsAmerican sociologist (1916-1962)
- 5.
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 MillsAmerican sociologist (1916-1962)
- 6.
Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.
C. Wright MillsAmerican sociologist (1916-1962)
- 7.
People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages.
C. Wright MillsAmerican sociologist (1916-1962)
- 8.
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 MillsAmerican sociologist (1916-1962)
- 9.
Every revolution has its counterrevolution – that is a sign the revolution is for real.
C. Wright MillsAmerican sociologist (1916-1962)
- 10.
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 MillsAmerican sociologist (1916-1962)
- 11.
The principal cause of war is war itself.
C. Wright MillsAmerican sociologist (1916-1962)