C. Wright Mills

"Mass entertainment serves to pacify rather than educate, to distract rather than illuminate."

"Personal transformation is inseparable from social transformation; we cannot change ourselves without changing our world."

"The loss of craftsmanship in modern work represents a fundamental loss of human capacity and dignity."

"Truth-telling in a system organized around deception requires courage and often comes at great cost."

"The first lesson of history is that evil is often done by those who think they are doing good."

"Power is the ability to impose one's will upon others."

"The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society."

"We are living in a time of transition, and those who fail to understand this are condemned to irrelevance."

"Knowledge is not enough; we must apply it. Imagination is not enough; we must act."

"The function of sociology is to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange."

"A man may be intellectually convinced of a theory, yet either dislike it or find it practically inconvenient."

"The more a man studies the individual in isolation from society, the less he can understand him."

"Freedom is not something to be given; it is something to be seized and fought for."

"The organized cynicism of modern elites demands our critical attention."

"To be a human being is to possess a biography; to possess a biography is to participate in history."

"The human being is a creature of habit and cultural inheritance."

"We cannot understand the individual without understanding the social forces that shape him."

"Beware the expert who claims absolute certainty in matters of human affairs."

"The promises of democracy are often betrayed by those who claim to defend it."

"Labor is the measure of all value, yet we have come to measure men by what they consume."

"The personal troubles of individuals may be understood only in terms of public issues."

"Authority without legitimacy breeds contempt and resistance."

"The intellectual has a responsibility to question the assumptions of his time."

"To refuse to participate in the system is itself a form of participation."

"Modern man feels trapped between the demands of society and his own authentic desires."

"The mass society produces mass culture and mass manipulation."

"We are all influenced more than we know by forces we cannot see."

"To understand America, one must understand the power elite that truly rules it."

"Conscience is the voice of our better self, and it grows stronger when we listen to it."

"The greatest form of oppression is the making of certain truths unspeakable."