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

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.

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

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.

Some versions of patriotism come close to the tribal, which we all want to surpass, and some don’t.

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

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