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

To win power anywhere you have to convince people that you can do something for them.
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

There is a fuzzy but real distinction that can and I believe should be made, between patriotism, which is attachment to a way of life, and nationalism, which is the insistence that your way of life deserves to rule over other ways of life.
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 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

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.
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