'For months I felt that the preceding pages were beyond my abilities, and I now no longer felt equal to my own work.'

'… this awareness of the medium creates a sense of intimacy with the reader.'

'… what was most modern was the rejection of authority…'

'Here in America there is no difference between a man and his economic fate. A man is made by his assets, income, position, and prospects. The economic mask coincides completely with a man's inner character. Everyone is worth what he earns and earns what he is worth. He learns what he is through the vicissitudes of his economic existence. He knows nothing else. The materialistic critique of society once objected against idealism that existence determined consciousness and not vice versa, and that the truth about society did not lie in its idealistic conception of itself but in its economy; contemporary men have rejected such idealism. They judge themselves by their own market value and learn what they are from what happens to them in the capitalistic economy. Their fate, however sad it may be, is not something outside them; they recognize its validity. A dying man in China might say, in a lowered voice:

Fortune did not smile upon me in this world.
Where am I going now? Up into the mountains
to seek peace for my lonely heart.

I am a failure, the American says—and that is that.'

'Something has gone wrong in our collective idea of the "public."'

'You'd have written them too. There's nothing secret about it.'

'a sort of shorthand of emotional significances for later reference'

'… a question of whether all these sensors, filters, profiles and algorithms can be used by citizens and communities for some kind of emancipation from bureaucracies and companies.'

Scholarship: Vlastos says he had a year off at the Institute for Advanced Study to work on Plato, decided to work only on the Socratic dialogues, spent the year writing a perfectly fine book, looked at it, decided: 'the best thing I could do with that MS was to junk it'. So he did.