Todd Gitlin Quotes & Sayings

“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.”

“Some versions of patriotism come close to the tribal, which we all want to surpass, and some don't.”

“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.”

“Human inertia makes the everyday environment, the furniture, as it were, appear to be a given.”

“Navigation is power of a limited sort - it enables us to manage the immensity of the media torrent.”

“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.”

“It's an old anarchist dream that people can take care of their own lives.”

“Mills insisted that a sociologist's proper subject was the intersection of biography and history.”

“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.”

“Right now, we have no possibility of politics because we have a one-party state.”