Todd Gitlin quotes

It's an old anarchist dream that people can take care of their own lives. (Todd Gitlin)
My position is not that John Kerry is either Jesus Christ or the prophet Mohammad. My position is that John Kerry is the possibility of restarting politics. View quote
Todd Gitlin
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. View quote
Todd Gitlin
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. View quote
Todd Gitlin
Some versions of patriotism come close to the tribal, which we all want to surpass, and some don't. View quote
Todd Gitlin
A century of convulsive change leaves huge demographic gouge marks. View quote
Todd Gitlin
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. View quote
Todd Gitlin
Americas are, for a variety of reasons, the most adept at producing the kind of entertainment that delivers easy satisfactions. View quote
Todd Gitlin
To win power anywhere you have to convince people that you can do something for them. View quote
Todd Gitlin
Navigation is power of a limited sort - it enables us to manage the immensity of the media torrent. View quote
Todd Gitlin
We may repeat the awful revolutionary history of the 20th century because of the vulnerability of social movements to demagoguery. (Todd Gitlin)
All I will say is that there are particular features of the American constitutional system that renders a third party futile - at best. View quote
Todd Gitlin
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. View quote
Todd Gitlin
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. View quote
Todd Gitlin
The moguls are driven by their respective desires for profit - period. View quote
Todd Gitlin
So American culture is itself a hybrid and lends itself to use in other people's hybrids. View quote
Todd Gitlin
My business is the analytical framework. View quote
Todd Gitlin
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. View quote
Todd Gitlin
Right now, we have no possibility of politics because we have a one-party state. View quote
Todd Gitlin
Sure, I've often been misrepresented - anyone frequently quoted has this experience. View quote
Todd Gitlin
Today's global justice movement may be the biggest, most diverse and energetic in history. (Todd Gitlin)
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. View quote
Todd Gitlin
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. View quote
Todd Gitlin
Mills insisted that a sociologist's proper subject was the intersection of biography and history. View quote
Todd Gitlin
The fancy term for what America has squandered in the past year and a half or so is legitimacy. View quote
Todd Gitlin