The professional celebrity, male and female, is the crowning result of the star system of a society that makes a fetish of competition. In America, this system is carried to the point where a man who can knock a small white ball into a series of holes in the ground with more efficiency than anyone else thereby gains social access to the President of the United States.

What I have been trying to say to intellectuals, preachers, scientists- as well as more generally to publics- can be put into one sentence: drop the liberal rhetoric and the conservative default; they are now parts of one and the same official line; transcend that line.

Whatever sociology may be, it is the result of constantly asking the question, what is the meaning of this?

Let every man be his own methodologist, let every man be his own theorist.

Power is not of a man. Wealth does not center in the person of the wealthy. Celebrity is not inherent in any personality. To be celebrated, to be wealthy, to have power requires access to major institutions.

Fate has to do with events in history that are the summary and unintended results of innumerable decisions of innumerable men.

P4- the history that now effects everyman is world history.

The nearest the modern general or admiral comes to a small-arms encounter of any sort is at a duck hunt in the company of corporation executives at the retreat of Continental Motors, Inc.

For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an 'emergency' without a foreseeable end... such men as these are crackpot realists: in the name of realism they have constructed a paranoid reality all their own.

The life-fate of the modern individual depends not only upon the family into which he was born or which he enters by marriage, but increasingly upon the corporation in which he spends the most alert hours of his best years.

The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. This is its task and its promise.

What one side considers a defense the other considers a threat. In the vortex of the struggle, each is trapped by his own fearful outlook and by his fear of the other; each moves and is moved within a circle both vicious and lethal.

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.

Prestige is the shadow of money and power.

The means of effective communication are being expropriated from the intellectual worker.

Prestige is the shadow of money and power. Where these are, there it is. Like the national market for soap or automobiles and the enlarged arena of federal power, the national cash-in area for prestige has grown, slowly being consolidated into a truly national system.

In the world of the celebrity, the hierarchy of publicity has replaced the hierarchy of descent and even of great wealth.

Every revolution has its counterrevolution -- that is a sign the revolution is for real.

The mass production of distraction is now as much a part of the American way of life as the mass production of automobiles.

Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary people do not usually know what this connection means for the kind of people they are becoming and for the kind of history-making in which they might take part.