C. Wright Mills
Overview
 
Charles Wright Mills was an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 sociologist
Sociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...

. Mills is best remembered for his 1959 book The Sociological Imagination
The Sociological Imagination
The Sociological Imagination is a book by American sociologist C. Wright Mills, first published by Oxford University Press in 1959 and still in print....

 in which he lays out a view of the proper relationship between biography and history, theory and method in sociological scholarship. He is also known for studying the structures of power and class in the U.S. in his book The Power Elite
The Power Elite
The Power Elite is a book written by the sociologist, C. Wright Mills, in 1956. In it Mills calls attention to the interwoven interests of the leaders of the military, corporate, and political elements of society and suggests that the ordinary citizen is a relatively powerless subject of...

. Mills was concerned with the responsibilities of intellectuals in post-World War II society, and advocated public, political engagement over uninterested observation.
Mills graduated from Dallas Technical High School in 1934.
Quotations

If we accept the Greek's definition of the idiot as an altogether private man, then we must conclude that many American citizens are now idiots. And I should not be surprised, although I don't know, if there were some such idiots even in Germany.

"Structure of Power in America", The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 9 (March 1958)

The point is that we are among those who cannot get their mouths around all the little Yeses that add up to tacit acceptance of a world run by crackpot realists and subject to blind drift. And that, you see, is something to which we do belong; we belong to those who are still capable of personally rejecting. Our minds are not yet captive.

Letters & Autobiographical Writings (1954) [University of California Press, 2000], p. 185.

To really belong, we have got, first, to get it clear with ourselves that we do not belong and do not want to belong to an unfree world. As free men and women we have got to reject much of it and to know why we are rejecting it.

Letters & Autobiographical Writings (1954) [University of California Press, 2000], p. 187.

If you do not specify and confront real issues, what you say will surely obscure them. If you do not embody controversy, what you say will be an acceptance of the drift to the coming human hell.

Foreword, The Marxists (1962)

IBM Plus Reality Plus Humanism=Sociology

Power, Politics, and People Boston: Beacon Press, (1963)

Every revolution has its counterrevolution — that is a sign the revolution is for real. And every revolution must defend itself against this counterrevolution, or the revolution will fail.

Listen Yankee (1960), pp. 54.

We know well that all new cultural beginnings today must be part of world culture; that no truly intellectual life can occur if the mind is restricted; that no art can have genuine and everlasting value if it is not in a universal language. East and West. God knows there is enough restriction. Enough laziness of stereotypes. Smash them, we say to ourselves. And the only way to do that is to open up a true world forum that is absolutely free.

Listen Yankee (1960), pp. 144-145.

 
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