Todd Gitlin Quotes
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Like Americans, people outside America want fun, want an emotional compensation for the utilitarianism and calculation that mark the rest of their lives.
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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.
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All I will say is that there are particular features of the American constitutional system that renders a third party futile - at best.
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I am a realist as well as an idealist, and I think that it is incumbent upon those of us in opposition to try to work within what are always arduous circumstances to stretch the limits of the possible.
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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.
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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.
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Human inertia makes the everyday environment, the furniture, as it were, appear to be a given.
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There is a fuzzy but real distinction that can and I believe should be made, between patriotism, which is attachment to a way of life, and nationalism, which is the insistence that your way of life deserves to rule over other ways of life.
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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.
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Americas are, for a variety of reasons, the most adept at producing the kind of entertainment that delivers easy satisfactions.
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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.
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Navigation is power of a limited sort - it enables us to manage the immensity of the media torrent.
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Mills insisted that a sociologist's proper subject was the intersection of biography and history.
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Some versions of patriotism come close to the tribal, which we all want to surpass, and some don’t.
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I first came to think about media and politics in the late 1960s, having observed some distortions up close, but since then I wouldn't say that my personal experience has remained an important motive for my writing about media.
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The moguls are driven by their respective desires for profit - period.
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It's an old anarchist dream that people can take care of their own lives.
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Today's global justice movement may be the biggest, most diverse and energetic in history.
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We may repeat the awful revolutionary history of the 20th century because of the vulnerability of social movements to demagoguery.
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Right now, we have no possibility of politics because we have a one-party state.
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My business is the analytical framework.
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A century of convulsive change leaves huge demographic gouge marks.
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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.
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Sure, I've often been misrepresented - anyone frequently quoted has this experience.
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So American culture is itself a hybrid and lends itself to use in other people's hybrids.
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If the Bible is a creation myth, it is an amorphous confusing one
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Who of us does not recognize that the life we live, however larded with brave talk about values and thought and ideals, is not actually a life dedicated to immersion in the endless torrent of images, songs, sounds and stories?
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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
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I don't think anyone in the media thinks strategically about society.
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The genius of the economic machine is in its ability to convert these indulgences into profitability. It converts desire into attention, a grip on our eyeballs and eardrums, which in turn can be marketed to advertisers.
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