37 quotes
The idea of the elite as composed of men and women having a finer moral character is an ideology of the elite.
The Power Elite (1956)
Nobody talks more of free enterprise and competition and of the best man winning than the man who inherited his father's store or farm.
White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951)
Most American men of affairs have learned well the rhetoric of public relations, in some cases even to the point of using it when they are alone, and thus coming to believe it.
The Power Elite (1956)
To overcome the academic prose you have first to overcome the academic pose.
The Sociological Imagination (1959)
When ever the standards of the moneyed life prevail, the man with money, no matter how he got it, will eventually be respected.
Power, Politics, and People (1963)
Hegel is correct: we learn from history that we cannot learn from it.
The Power Elite (1956)
Here's to the day when the complete works of Leon Trotsky are published and widely distributed in the Soviet Union. On that day the USSR will have achieved democracy!
Every revolution has its counterrevolution — that is a sign the revolution is for real. And every revolution must defend itself against this counterrevolution, or the revolution will fail.
Listen Yankee (1960)
People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite, and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves.
The Power Elite (1956)
Atrocity on a mass scale has become impersonal and official; moral indignation as a public fact has become extinct or made trivial.
Letters & Autobiographical Writings (1954)
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.
The Power Elite (1956)
American men of affairs have learned well the rhetoric of public relations, in some cases even to the point of using it when they are alone, and thus coming to believe it.
The Power Elite (1956)
As public communications are expanded and speeded up, their effectiveness is worn out by repetition; so there is a continuous demand for new slogans and beliefs and ideologies.
The Sociological Imagination (1959)
The mass has no autonomy from institutions; on the contrary, agents of authorized institutions penetrate this mass, reducing any autonomy it may have in the formation of opinion by discussion.
The Power Elite (1961)
Every interest and power, every passion and bias, every hatred and hope tends to acquire an ideological apparatus with which to compete with the slogans and symbols, the doctrines and appeals of other interests.
The Sociological Imagination (1959)
IBM Plus Reality Plus Humanism=Sociology
The first rule for understanding the human condition is that men live in second-hand worlds. They are aware of much more than they have personally experienced; and their own experience is always indirect.
Power, Politics, and People (1963)
If you do not specify and confront real issues, what you say will surely obscure them. If you do not embody controversy, what you say will be an acceptance of the drift to the coming human hell.
The demand for explicit ideological justifications has been greatly enlarged, if only because new institutions of enormous power have arisen but have not been legitimated, and because older powers have outrun their old sanctions.
The Sociological Imagination (1959)
[A]s a proportion of the labor force, fewer individuals manipulate things, more handle people and symbols.
White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951)