Todd Gitlin

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“A century of convulsive change leaves huge demographic gouge marks.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”