America is a nation with no truly national city, no Paris, no Rome, no London, no city which is at once the social center, the political capital, and the financial hub.
C. Wright MillsRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Our modern lives are deeply influenced by the corporations we work for, alongside our family backgrounds.
C. Wright Mills highlights the significant impact of corporations on an individual's life beyond the traditional influences of family. In today's society, the time and energy we dedicate to our jobs in corporations shape our identities, opportunities, and experiences, suggesting that one's fate is intertwined with their corporate environment as much as their familial connections.
Themes
CorporationFamilyLifeIndividualInfluence
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about work-life balance, one might refer to this quote to illustrate the importance of corporate culture on personal lives.
More from C. Wright Mills
All quotes →If you do not specify and confront real issues, what you say will surely obscure them. If you do not embody controversy, what you say will be an acceptance of the drift to the coming human hell.
C. Wright MillsRead
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.
C. Wright MillsRead
People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages.
C. Wright MillsRead
Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them -- and then, the opportunity to choose.
C. Wright MillsRead
In the world of the celebrity, the hierarchy of publicity has replaced the hierarchy of descent and even of great wealth.
C. Wright MillsRead
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I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.
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Liberty is to faction, what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be a less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.
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I'm sitting in my home office wearing a bathrobe. The same way I'm not going to start wearing ties, I'm also not going to buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords.
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Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.
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Born to an age where horror has become commonplace, where tragedy has, by its monotonous repetition, become a parody of sorrow, we need to fence off a few parks where humans try to be fair, where skill has some hope of reward, where absurdity has a harder time than usual getting a ticket.
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