Todd Gitlin Quotes

• There is a misunderstanding by marketers in our culture about what freedom of choice is. In the market, it is equated with multiplying choice. This is a misconception. If you have infinite choice, people are reduced to passivity.

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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.

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in Experience, Politics

  Tags in Important

• 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.

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in Power

  Tags in Process

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

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in American

• 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.

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Perform, American

• 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.

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Democrats, Fine

• A century of convulsive change leaves huge demographic gouge marks.

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Century

• 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.

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Media

• 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.

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Write, End

• 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.

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in Work

  Tags in Think, Limitation

• Human inertia makes the everyday environment, the furniture, as it were, appear to be a given.

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Human

• 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.

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in Country

  Tags in American

• 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.

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in Life, Politics

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

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in America

  Tags in Calculation

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

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in Society

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

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in History

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

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in Dream

• 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.

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in America, Power

  Tags in Book

• 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.

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in American

• My business is the analytical framework.

  Todd Gitlin

  Topics in Business

Todd Gitlin (36)

Birth:	1943
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Author, Critic, Novelist, Professor, Sociologist, Writer

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Today's Anniversary - 10th December

Births

• 1907 - Rumer Godden
• 1956 - Rod Blagojevich
• 1893 - Lew Brown
• 1908 - Olivier Messiaen
• 1903 - William Plomer

Deaths

• 1972 - Mark Van Doren
• 2005 - Eugene McCarthy
• 1946 - Walter Perry Johnson
• 2005 - Richard Pryor
• 1936 - Luigi Pirandello