Todd Gitlin Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The manufacture of desire isn't at the heart - if it isn't absurd to speak of a heart - of the media torrent. Chronic dissatisfaction is at the heart of the matter.

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

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

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

The moguls are driven by their respective desires for profit - period.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

A century of convulsive change leaves huge demographic gouge marks.

I think there's a desire for results, a hard-bitten realism. The primary goal is not some sort of symbolic display, or some sort of posture or attitude, but results. If that's what it means, then I applaud the turn to practicality. Today the far right is in charge, and I don't think you can create the possibility of broad-based radicalism until you defeat the far right. Put the center in power and then you have the possibility--or the luxury--of radicalism.

I think we have a national attention deficit disorder, ... Because we're so itchy. We're changing the channel, the camera is constantly moving, the edits are flying thick and fast.

We are in the midst of a tremendous global revolution, ... and the consequences are on a scale that are hitherto unprecedented.

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.

Again, the only trends that interest the corporate boys and girls are demographic and businesslike. I doubt the think tank reports interest them much.

People who feel that their ways of life are threatened or feel generally anxious or confused about the way things are going are disposed to look for causes.

You're in the news business and you're in the business of arresting the attention of people and prying them away from what they take for granted. They must read the next day's paper and so on. While the desire to gain attention is a dynamic in journalism, it's not the only one. The predominant dynamic since journalism's inception has been the desire to capture the attention of people. Another dynamic is the extension of democratic enlightenment.

I have no action plan, and as a writer I don't want to get hung up on the advantages and disadvantages of particular strategies.

It's not a bunch of green-haired kids with punctures in their faces.

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

Can't address the big fact that the bulk of life is taking place under the pressure of an onslaught of images.

Access journalism has become the ends, not the means.

It's too hot to handle. He was scathing toward Bush and it was absolutely devastating. They don't know how to handle such a pointed and aggressive criticism.

My business is the analytical framework.

Today's global justice movement may be the biggest, most diverse and energetic in history.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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