Mike Mills Quotes

Men do not make history according to their own free will. But they make history nonetheless.

It is feasible for someone who comes from a privileged background to understand the privilege they have had and to use the formal political arena in a way that would disperse power and engage with people in their own lives.

As I say, I as an abstract artist was active politically.

I felt that what is personal is political.

Many people on the political left found my work psychologically liberating. They began to say: once you realize that standards emerge historically, then you can see through and discard all the norms to which we have been falsely enslaved.

I am a strong believer in the intertwined nature of the personal and the political; I think they move together.

The paradox of American democracy has been that its slogan of equal opportunity has meant, often, equal opportunity to get power over your fellows.

The main reason western culture has been dominant is because Europeans have controlled political, economic and social power including educational policy for the last several centuries.

Every intellectual attitude is latently political.

One of the frustrating tics of our society's progressive vanguard is the assumption that every evil it discovers was entirely invisible in the past, that this generation is the first to wrestle with dominance and cruelty.

There is always a very delicate interplay between individual actions and institutional conditions. But there is no such thing as institutional conditions without any individual actions and no such thing as individual action without institutional conditions. So there is always personal responsibility.

Liberals have invented whole college majors - psychology, sociology and women's studies - to prove that nothing is anybody's fault.

So persuasive is the power of the institutions we have created that they shape not only our preferences but actually our sense of possibilities.

Power, privilege, and violence are not, and never were, strictly Southern issues in America.

There's been a thread of coverage implying that Corbyn is a decent guy but he clearly doesn't understand how the world works. Ignoring the fact that for the majority of people, it doesn't.

It's very hard to find artists in the history of western art who don't make portraiture ideological in some way.

My art gets called political, as opposed to my intending it to be political. I think that's something that happens with black artists or marginalized voices trying to speak truth. Because there are things in the status quo to speak out against, speaking out against them will inherently be political.

Intersectionality is not easy. It's not as though the existing frameworks that we have - from our culture, our politics, or our law - automatically lead people to being conversant and literate in intersectionality.

When you look at the history of slavery in the United States, and you see the impact that 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' had, culture sometimes is the only way that we can put people's eyes on an emotional truth and make them feel why something has to change.

I have come to the conclusion that the West is a vast lie machine for the secret agendas of vested interests.

Very early on in the process of trying to sell 'The Summer Prince,' I was told, 'Slavery seems to be very important to this society - is that on purpose?' Well, duh.

If I want to get my ideas out, I have to be involved in the mechanism that the world is ran by.

I have a problem with superheroes in general because, politically, superheroes are cops. Superheroes work with the government to uphold the law. And who do the laws work for?

As both an essayist and science fiction and fantasy novelist, I write about and for the future. I talk about the past to remind us that what we believe has always been true - that men and women are somehow static categories, or that men in power has always been the default, or that same-sex love affairs were always taboo - has not always been thus.

I think hip-hop has always been political because this is a community that doesn't have any other choice.