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
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
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
Some versions of patriotism come close to the tribal, which we all want to surpass, and some don’t. – Todd Gitlin
We may repeat the awful revolutionary history of the 20th century because of the vulnerability of social movements to demagoguery. – 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
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
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
Today’s global justice movement may be the biggest, most diverse and energetic in history. – 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
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
Human inertia makes the everyday environment, the furniture, as it were, appear to be a given. – 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
Navigation is power of a limited sort – it enables us to manage the immensity of the media torrent. – 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
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
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
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
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
