“Part of life has a public orientation, but part of it does not. He has a private self that looks inward, and he should be able to feel with some distinctness the difference between public and private roles. It strikes me that those eighteenth century individuals who wrote letters to the newspapers signed “Publius” or something like that, were giving expression to this difference. When the writer appeared before the public in the common interest, he was conscious of stepping outside of his private considerations and entering into another capacity, of assuming a posture. The rest of the time he was his own man, which his thoughts and feelings reserved for himself.”
“Individuality and Modernity,” Essays on Individuality (Philadelphia: 1958), p. 72.
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Richard M. Weaver 110
American scholar 1910–1963Related quotes
“Commerce and Culture,” p. 280.
Giants and Dwarfs (1990)

2000s
Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 26

Country Living and Country Thinking, Preface, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“That consecrated combination of private interests and public plunders.”
Mosley on the banking system, Annual Report (1925) of the Independent Labour Party, quoted in Robert Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley (Papermacs, 1981), p. 142.