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.

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 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 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.

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

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.

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