Todd Gitlin Quotes

Sure, I've often been misrepresented - anyone frequently quoted has this experience.

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

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.

So every day I'm mindful as I watch the Bush crowd extend their sway into policies of every imaginable variety, and over almost every square foot of earth, that the control of the American state is a matter of urgency.

So American culture is itself a hybrid and lends itself to use in other people's hybrids.

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

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

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.

My business is the analytical framework.

My book is focused on the power of the American state, not least because the government of the United States governs so much that the case could be made that everybody around the world ought to have a vote in determining some of its policies.

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

Like Americans, people outside America want fun, want an emotional compensation for the utilitarianism and calculation that mark the rest of their lives.

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

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.

I don't think anyone in the media thinks strategically about society.

I don't for the life of me understand how anybody could contemplate the results of the 2000 election in the US and say that electoral politics doesn't matter any more, and that Ralph Nader was right when he said there is no difference between the two parties.

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

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.

As I write at the end, if we step back and face the enormity of the torrent, then we have taken the first step to imagining what we might want to do about it.

Americas are, for a variety of reasons, the most adept at producing the kind of entertainment that delivers easy satisfactions.

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.

All I will say is that there are particular features of the American constitutional system that renders a third party futile - at best.

A century of convulsive change leaves huge demographic gouge marks.

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.

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.