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

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

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

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


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

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

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

My business is the analytical framework.
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.
Todd Gitlin

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

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