Quotes by Todd Gitlin

About Todd Gitlin:

Todd Gitlin is an American sociologist, political writer, novelist, and cultural commentator. He has written widely on the mass media, politics, intellectual life and the arts, for both popular and scholarly publications.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

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

Todd Gitlin

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

Todd Gitlin

The moguls are driven by their respective desires for profit - period.

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.

Todd Gitlin

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

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

Todd Gitlin

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

Todd Gitlin

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.

Todd Gitlin

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.

Todd Gitlin

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

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

Todd Gitlin

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

Sure, I've often been misrepresented - anyone frequently quoted has this experience.

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.

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.

Todd Gitlin

My business is the analytical framework.

Todd Gitlin

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

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

Todd Gitlin

Today's global justice movement may be the biggest, most diverse and energetic in history.

Todd Gitlin

Author Bio

  • NameTodd Gitlin
  • DescriptionAmerican sociologist
  • BornJanuary 6, 1943
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionSociologist