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The point is that we are among those who cannot get their mouths around all the little Yeses that add up to tacit acceptance of a world run by crackpot realists and subject to blind drift. And that, you see, is something to which we do belong; we belong to those who are still capable of personally rejecting. Our minds are not yet captive.

— C. Wright Mills Letters & Autobiographical Writings (1954)

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More quotes by C. Wright Mills

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)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: C. Wright Mills (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.