C. Wright Mills - History Quotes

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Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.

C. Wright Mills
For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an 'emergency' without a foreseeable end,... Such men as these are crackpot realists: in the name of realism they have constructed a paranoid reality all their own.

C. Wright Mills
The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. That is its task and its promise. To recognize this task and this promise is the mark of the classic social analyst.

C. Wright Mills
In our time, what is at issue is the very nature of man, the image we have of his limits and possibilities as a man. History is not yet done with its exploration of the limits and meanings of human nature.

C. Wright Mills
Above all, do not give up your moral and political autonomy by accepting in somebody else's terms the illiberal practicality of the bureaucratic ethos or the liberal practicality of the moral scatter. Know that many personal troubles cannot be solved merely as troubles, but must be understood in terms of public issues — and in terms of the problems of history making.

C. Wright Mills
Any contemporary political re-statement of liberal and socialist goals must include as central the idea of a society in which all men would become men of substantive reason, whose independent reasoning would have structural consequences for their societies, its history and thus for their own life fates.

C. Wright Mills
The very shaping of history now outpaces the ability of men to orient themselves in accordance with cherished values.

C. Wright Mills