C. Wright Mills Quotes

Life, it is true, can be grasped in all its confused futility merely by opening one's eyes and sitting passively, a spectator on the stands of history - but to understand the social processes and conflicts, the interplay between individual and group, even the physicality of human experience, we have need of small-scale models.

I'm more into human nature than politics. But they're intertwined. Obviously, I live in civilization, so politics are part of my life.

It is our common experience as human beings that the results of social forces seem to admit only of 'probabilistic' predictions.

If we compare the present time with former ages, we find that the same tendencies and desires have at all times governed states and peoples.

A wise human would have an understanding of the supply chain and how the pieces fit together. But it's against our nature to think about it.

Humans have always used animals to depict ideas about themselves: ideas about their status, about their position in life and society and the world.

We cannot understand our humanity just by studying individuals.

The work on ants has profoundly affected the way I think about humans.

Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand.

Science explained people, but could not understand them.

The deeper we trace the political influences in history, the more are we convinced that the "will to power" has up to now been one of the strongest motives in the development of human social forms.

Economic theory does not work with human beings. We are far too messy.

One of the things that is so important, critical I think, in reading not just the founders but thousands of years as you put it, that discussion about corruption, is that you can't talk about the problem of corruption without talking about human nature.

When I'm not writing, I do a lot of research reading on the shape of civilization. Fiction can be a lot of different things... but I feel like it's my job to write about the way things are.

We're a blip in the existence of the universe, and we're constantly trying to pull each other down. Not doing things to help each other.

History, at its best, always tells us as much indirectly about ourselves as it does directly about our predecessors, and it is often most revealing when it deals with episodes and phenomena that we find repulsive.

What's so interesting to me about history is - what's interesting to anyone - is how humans are the same. Their belief systems were so different. They had different metaphysical truths than we do. And yet we're the same.

Unfortunately, of course, guilt is an artifact of agricultural-age religion and is designed specifically to prevent humans from thinking and operating on a collective level.

Guess what? Human beings are complex.

Military history is essential to understanding any history and, moreover, is a terrifying and sobering study in the realities of human nature - for yes, to me, such a thing exists, and history indeed proves it.

In so complex a thing as human nature, we must consider it is hard to find rules without exception.

The most important misunderstanding seems to me to lie in a confusion between the human necessities which I consider part of human nature, and the human necessities as they appear as drives, needs, passions, etc., in any given historical period.

It is only by historical analysis that we can discover what makes up man, since it is only in the course of history that he is formed.

The value of history. ..is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.

History distinguishes what is accidental and transitory in human nature from what is essential and immutable.