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 Quote

American movies and music deliver themes of freedom, innocence, and power that appeal to others - partly because America itself was put together out of a multiplicity of national traditions.
- Todd Gitlin Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

I don't think anyone in the media thinks strategically about society.
- Todd Gitlin Quote

I first came to think about media and politics in the late 1960s, having observed some distortions up close, but since then I wouldn't say that my personal experience has remained an important motive for my writing about media.
- Todd Gitlin Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

My business is the analytical framework.
- Todd Gitlin Quote

Navigation is power of a limited sort - it enables us to manage the immensity of the media torrent.
- Todd Gitlin Quote

Right now, we have no possibility of politics because we have a one-party state.
- Todd Gitlin Quote

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 Quote

Some fine day, Democrats may figure out how to get on the right side of the value divide - how to define America as a place of the common good and not a playground of the strong.
- Todd Gitlin Quote

Some versions of patriotism come close to the tribal, which we all want to surpass, and some don't.
- Todd Gitlin Quote

The fancy term for what America has squandered in the past year and a half or so is legitimacy.
- Todd Gitlin Quote

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 Quote

The mobilisation which Bush has been able to perform since 11 September 2001 has to be fought - at least by Americans - in the name of a wise, honourable and democratic patriotism.
- Todd Gitlin Quote

The moguls are driven by their respective desires for profit - period.
- Todd Gitlin Quote

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 Quote

To win power anywhere you have to convince people that you can do something for them.
- Todd Gitlin Quote

Today's global justice movement may be the biggest, most diverse and energetic in history.
- Todd Gitlin Quote