“Don't we all know that art is dangerous. You play it - then you live it.”

“Commentary would come to life in 1945 amid widespread predictions that mass unemployment would resume as soon as war production ebbed. But it wouldn’t take long after the war to see that the dire prophecies had failed. It became clear that Western democracy was far from finished; American power seemed limitless.”

“American socialism had lost momentum even before the war. (Socialist leader Norman Thomas received 885,000 votes in his 1932 run for the presidency, but only 187,500 in 1936.)”

“You know those nights where the day has unfolded in such a way that now, in the night, you can feel all the gaps in your body and you can see all the reasons you’re not who you wish you were - you know those nights where the only sound is of you drinking and the people outside who have each other to drink with - those nights when you’re unable to think or be or do because of the paralyzing loneliness - it feels like a hundred of those nights - stitched together and squared - and they come to me in a blush.”

“It's toys, boy, all toys. You'll see more and more contraptions as you get older, but if I teach you anything, you'll learn that all of this is decoration. What counts is what's inside you and what you can see in others. ”

“Besides, isn't it confoundedly easy to think you're a great man if you aren't burdened with the slightest idea that Rembrandt, Beethoven, Dante or Napoleon ever lived?”

“Thus we can see that – at least at the level of economics – democracy is a sort of slow-motion suicide, in which you are told that it is the highest civic virtue to approve of thosewho want to rob you.”