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
The only people available to change the world are the people now living in it, with all the beliefs they bring along - however retrograde those beliefs may appear to those of us who see ourselves as enlightened.
Todd Gitlin
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
The manufacture of desire isn`t at the heart - if it isn`t absurd to speak of a heart - of the media torrent. Chronic dissatisfaction is at the heart of the matter.
Todd Gitlin
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
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
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
My position is not that John Kerry is either Jesus Christ or the prophet Mohammad. My position is that John Kerry is the possibility of restarting politics.
Todd Gitlin
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
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
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
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 part...
Todd Gitlin
I am concerned about how to reverse the process by which a fundamentalist right and a corporate elite were able to seize power in the United States.
Todd Gitlin
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
We may repeat the awful revolutionary history of the 20th century because of the vulnerability of social movements to demagoguery.
Todd Gitlin
