Todd Gitlin Quotes

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.

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

To win power anywhere you have to convince people that you can do something for them.

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.

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.

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?

[I]n politics, reputation is the prologue to fact...

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.

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

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

A century of convulsive change leaves huge demographic gouge marks.

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

We may repeat the awful revolutionary history of the 20th century because of the vulnerability of social movements to demagoguery.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

The only people available to change the world are the people now living in it, with all the beliefs they bring along - however retrograde those beliefs may appear to those of us who see ourselves as enlightened.

The fancy term for what America has squandered in the past year and a half or so is legitimacy.

My business is the analytical framework.

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.