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

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.

Americas are, for a variety of reasons, the most adept at producing the kind of entertainment that delivers easy satisfactions.

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

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

It's an old anarchist dream that people can take care of their own lives.

We may repeat the awful revolutionary history of the 20th century because of the vulnerability of social movements to demagoguery.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

So American culture is itself a hybrid and lends itself to use in other people's hybrids.

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

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.

Human inertia makes the everyday environment, the furniture, as it were, appear to be a given.

A century of convulsive change leaves huge demographic gouge marks.

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.

Mills insisted that a sociologist's proper subject was the intersection of biography and history.

Sure, I've often been misrepresented - anyone frequently quoted has this experience.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My business is the analytical framework.

Like Americans, people outside America want fun, want an emotional compensation for the utilitarianism and calculation that mark the rest of their lives.

I don't think anyone in the media thinks strategically about society.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

All I will say is that there are particular features of the American constitutional system that renders a third party futile - at best.

Americans admire a people who can scratch a desert and produce a garden. The Israelis have shown qualities that Americans identify with: guts, patriotism, idealism, a passion for freedom. I have seen it. I know. I believe that.

Politics is too partisan, and sometimes patriotism is cast aside. Patriotism is honor and love of your country and your brothers and sisters. With politics I get the impression that it's all about what's good for the party and not necessarily what's good for the country.

Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.

Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.

Patriotism is an instant reaction that fades away when the war starts.

These martyrs of patriotism gave their lives for an idea.

Patriotism is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.

True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.

Our young people have come to look upon war as a kind of beneficent deity, which not only adds to the national honor but uplifts a nation and develops patriotism and courage.

Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.

Patriotism is easy to understand in America. It means looking out for yourself by looking out for your country.

The higher American patriotism, on the other hand, combines loyalty to historical tradition and precedent with the imaginative projection of an ideal national Promise.

Gentlemen have talked a great deal of patriotism. A venerable word, when duly practised.