C. Wright Mills

Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.

The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals.

What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves.

The first fruit of this imagination—and the first lesson of the social science that embodies it—is the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances.

Men are free to make history, but not under circumstances of their own choosing.

The power elite are those who, by virtue of their positions in the large-scale organizations and institutions, are able to make decisions that have major consequences.

The power elite, for all its structural implications, is a psychological and moral problem.

The ordinary man is a member of a mass, a unit in a statistic, a cipher in a calculation.

The history of modern society is the history of the increasing rationalization of human conduct.

The white-collar man is the new little man.

The white-collar people are not a class in the old sense of the word; they are a mass.

The sociological imagination is not merely a fashion. It is a demand.

To be a good social scientist, you must be a good craftsman.

The problems of our time, in short, cannot be solved by the methods of our time.

The sociological imagination is a quality of mind that seems most dramatically to promise an understanding of the intimate realities of ourselves in connection with larger social realities.

The sociological imagination is not merely a way of looking at things, but a way of doing things.

The sociological imagination is not merely a personal gift, but a cultural necessity.

The sociological imagination is not merely a tool, but a weapon.

The sociological imagination is not merely a perspective, but a commitment.

The sociological imagination is not merely a method, but a morality.