In the world of the celebrity, the hierarchy of publicity has replaced the hierarchy of descent and even of great wealth.

All politics is a struggle for power; the ultimate kind of power is violence.

To overcome the academic prose you have first to overcome the academic pose.

What I am asserting is that in this particular epoch a conjunction of historical circumstances has led to the rise of an elite of power; that the men of the circles composing this elite, severally and collectively, now make such key decisions as are made; and that, given the enlargement and the centralization of the means of power now available, the decisions that they make and fail to make carry more consequences for more people than has ever been the case in the world history of mankind

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

To say that you can 'have experience,' means, for one thing, that your past plays into and affects your present, and that it defines your capacity for future experience. As a social scientist, you have to control this rather elaborate interplay, to capture what you experience and sort it out; only in this way can you hope to use it to guide and test your reflection, and in the process shape yourself as an intellectual craftsman

Each day men sell little pieces if themselves in order to try to buy then back each night and weekend.