Top 100 Walter Lippmann Quotes
#1. This is one of the paradoxes of the democratic movement - that it loves a crowd and fears the individuals who compose it - that the religion of humanity should have no faith in human beings.
Walter Lippmann
#2. A large plural society cannot be governed without recognizing that, transcending its plural interests, there is a rational order with a superior common law.
Walter Lippmann
#3. Robinson Crusoe, the self-sufficient man, could not have lived in New York city.
Walter Lippmann
#4. There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.
Walter Lippmann
#5. A useful definition of liberty is obtained only by seeking the principle of liberty in the main business of human life, that is to say, in the process by which men educate their responses and learn to control their environment.
Walter Lippmann
#6. People who are tremendously concerned about their identification, their individuality, their self-expression, or their sense of humor, always seem to be missing the very things they pursue.
Walter Lippmann
#7. Popular government has not yet been proved to guarantee, always and everywhere, good government.
Walter Lippmann
#8. The self-evident truth which makes men invincible is that inalienably they are inviolable persons.
Walter Lippmann
#9. What each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him ... The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do.
Walter Lippmann
#10. The invisible government [bosses] is malign. But the evil doesn't come from the fact that it plays horse with the Newtonian theory of the constitution. What is dangerous about it is that we do not see it, cannot use it, and are compelled to submit to it.
Walter Lippmann
#11. Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.
Walter Lippmann
#12. We are concerned in public affairs, but immersed in our private ones.
Walter Lippmann
#13. Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.
Walter Lippmann
#14. Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.
Walter Lippmann
#15. Yet this corporate being, though so insubstantial to our senses, binds, in Burkes words, a man to his country with ties which though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. That is why young men die in battle for their countrys sake and why old men plant trees they will never sit under.
Walter Lippmann
#16. We are quite rich enough to defend ourselves, whatever the cost. We must now learn that we are quite rich enough to educate ourselves as we need to be educated.
Walter Lippmann
#17. Only the very rarest of princes can endure even a little criticism, and few of them can put up with even a pause in the adulation.
Walter Lippmann
#18. There is nothing so good for the human soul as the discovery that there are ancient and flourishing civilized societies which have somehow managed to exist for many centuries and are still in being though they have had no help from the traveler in solving their problems.
Walter Lippmann
#19. The mass of the reading public is not interested in learning and assimilating the results of accurate investigation.
Walter Lippmann
#20. When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.
Walter Lippmann
#21. Modern men are afraid of the past. It is a record of human achievement, but its other face is human defeat.
Walter Lippmann
#22. We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.
Walter Lippmann
#23. In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant.
Walter Lippmann
#24. There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil.
Walter Lippmann
#25. Usually it is the stereotyped shape assumed by an event at an obvious place that uncovers the run of the news.
Walter Lippmann
#26. In the blood of the martyrs to intolerance are the seeds of unbelief
Walter Lippmann
#27. Every fairly intelligent person is aware that the price of respectability is a muffled soul bent on the trivial and the mediocre.
Walter Lippmann
#28. The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.
Walter Lippmann
#29. Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main ballpark.
Walter Lippmann
#30. Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others.
Walter Lippmann
#31. The private citizen, beset by partisan appeals for the loan of his Public Opinion, will soon see, perhaps, that these appeals are not a compliment to his intelligence, but an imposition on his good nature and an insult to his sense of evidence.
Walter Lippmann
#32. The sovereign people determines life and death and happiness under conditions where experience and experiment alike show thought to be most difficult.
The intolerable burden of thought.
Walter Lippmann
#33. When men are brought face to face with their opponents, forced to listen and learn and mend their ideas, they cease to be children and savages and begin to live like civilized men. Then only is freedom a reality, when men may voice their opinions because they must examine their opinions.
Walter Lippmann
#34. We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception.
Walter Lippmann
#35. Nothing is easier than to simplify life and them make a philosophy about it. The trouble is that the resulting philosophy is true only of that simplified life.
Walter Lippmann
#36. Our life is managed from behind the scenes: we are actors in dramas that we cannot interpret. Of almost no decisive event can we say: this was our own choosing. We happen upon careers, necessity pushing, blind inclination pulling. If we stop to think we are amazed that we should be what we are.
Walter Lippmann
#37. The central drama of our age is how the Western nations and the Asian peoples are to find a tolerable basis of co-existence.
Walter Lippmann
#38. The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.
Walter Lippmann
#39. The Bill of Rights does not come from the people and is not subject to change by majorities. It comes from the nature of things. It declares the inalienable rights of man not only against all government but also against the people collectively.
Walter Lippmann
#40. The present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis in journalism.
Walter Lippmann
#41. In truly effective thinking the prime necessity is to liquidate judgments, regain an innocent eye, disentangle feelings, be curious and open-hearted.
Walter Lippmann
#42. Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant; fail to use them and it is weak.
Walter Lippmann
#43. The devil is merely a fallen angel, and when God lost Satan he lost one of his best lieutenants.
Walter Lippmann
#45. Inevitably our opinions cover a bigger space, a longer reach of time, a greater number of things, than we can directly observe. They have, therefore, to be pieced together out of what others have reported and what we can imagine.
Walter Lippmann
#46. The effort to calculate exactly what the voters want at each particular moment leaves out of account the fact that when they are troubled the thing the voters most want is to be told what to want.
Walter Lippmann
#47. Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity.
Walter Lippmann
#49. Theodore Roosevelt was a conservative who adopted progressive policies.
Walter Lippmann
#51. A long life in journalism convinced me many presidents ago that there should be a large air space between a journalist and the head of a state.
Walter Lippmann
#52. The common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialised class.
Walter Lippmann
#53. Those whom we love and admire most are the men and women whose consciousness is peopled thickly with persons rather than with types, who know us rather than the classification into which we might fit.
Walter Lippmann
#54. It is not the idea as such which the censor attacks, whether it be heresy or radicalism or obscenity. He attacks the circulation of the idea among the classes which in his judgment are not to be trusted with the idea.
Walter Lippmann
#55. Brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican Party.
Walter Lippmann
#56. We must protect the right of our opponents to speak because we must hear what they have to say.
Walter Lippmann
#57. What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truth from its errors.
Walter Lippmann
#58. Since position and contact play so big a part in determining what can be seen, heard, read, and experienced, as well as what it is permissible to see, hear, read, and know, it is no wonder that moral judgment is so much more common than constructive thought.
Walter Lippmann
#59. Run against the grain of a nation's genius and see where you get with your laws.
Walter Lippmann
#60. In government offices which are sensitive to the vehemence and passion of mass sentiment public men have no sure tenure. They are in effect perpetual office seekers, always on trial for their political lives, always required to court their restless constituents.
Walter Lippmann
#61. The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble upon a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it the representative of a whole class.
Walter Lippmann
#62. In the end, advertising rests upon the fact that consumers are a fickle and superstitious mob, incapable of any real judgment as to what it wants or how it is to get what it thinks it likes.
Walter Lippmann
#63. Behind innocence there gathers a clotted mass of superstition, of twisted and misdirected impulse; clandestine flirtation, fads, and ragtime fill the unventilated mind.
Walter Lippmann
#64. The deepest of all the stereotypes is the human stereotype which imputes human nature to inanimate or collective things.
Walter Lippmann
#65. Life is an irreversible process and for that reason its future can never be a repetition of the past.
Walter Lippmann
#66. But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another?
Walter Lippmann
#67. Nobody has yet found a way of bombing that can prevent foot soldiers from walking.
Walter Lippmann
#68. But if our philosophy tells us that each man is only a small part of the world, that his intelligence catches at best only phases and aspects in a coarse net of ideas, then, when we use our stereotypes, we tend to know that they are only stereotypes, to hold them lightly, to modify them gladly. We
Walter Lippmann
#69. The American's conviction that he must be able to look any man in the eye and tell him to go to hell is the very essence of the free man's way of life.
Walter Lippmann
#70. Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience.
Walter Lippmann
#71. One might point to the great illumination that has resulted from Freud's analysis of the abracadabra of our dreams. No one can any longer dismiss the fantasy because it is logically inconsistent, superficially absurd, or objectively untrue.
Walter Lippmann
#72. It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It is equally true that that government is best which provides most.
Walter Lippmann
#73. To understand is not only to pardon, but in the end to love.
Walter Lippmann
#74. Newspapers necessarilyand inevitably reflect, and therefore, in greater or lesser measure, intensify, the defective organization of public opinion.
Walter Lippmann
#75. The consent of the governed is more than a safeguard against ignorant tyrants: it is an insurance against benevolent despots as well.
Walter Lippmann
#76. A really good diplomat does not go in for victories, even when he wins them.
Walter Lippmann
#77. The press does not tell us what to think, it tells us what to think about.
Walter Lippmann
#78. It is at the cross-roads that skepticism is born, not in a hermitage.
Walter Lippmann
#79. When it comes to politics, "the facts far exceed our curiosity."
" ... A few executives here and there read them. The rest of us ignore them for the good and sufficient reason that we have other things to do ...
Walter Lippmann
#80. While the right to talk may be the beginning of freedom, the necessity of listening is what makes that right important.
Walter Lippmann
#81. Certainly he is not of the generation that regards honesty as the best policy. However, he does regard it as a policy.
Walter Lippmann
#82. The justification of majority rule in politics is not to be found in its ethical superiority.
Walter Lippmann
#83. Ages when custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy. The moralist cannot teach what is revealed; he must reveal what can be taught. He has to seek insight rather than to preach.
Walter Lippmann
#84. Where two factions see vividly each its own aspect, and contrive their own explanations of what they see, it is almost impossible for them to credit each other with honesty.
Walter Lippmann
#85. The principles of the good society call for a concern with an order of being - which cannot be proved existentially to the sense organs - where it matters supremely that the human person is inviolable, that reason shall regulate the will, that truth shall prevail over error.
Walter Lippmann
#86. The first principle of a civilized state is that the power is legitimate only when it is under contract.
Walter Lippmann
#87. The smashing of idols is in itself such a preoccupation that it is almost impossible for the iconoclast to look clearly into a future when there will not be many idols left to smash.
Walter Lippmann
#88. The search for moral guidance which shall not depend upon external authority has invariably ended in the acknowledgment of some new authority.
Walter Lippmann
#89. You don't have to preach honesty to men with a creative purpose. A genuine craftsman will not adulterate this product. The reason isn't because duty says he shouldn't, but because passion says he couldn't.
Walter Lippmann
#90. In making the great experiment of governing people by consent rather than by coercion, it is not sufficient that the party in power should have a majority. It is just as necessary that the party in power should never outrage the minority.
Walter Lippmann
#91. Democracy is much too important to be left to public opinion.
Walter Lippmann
#92. In a place where everybody thinks alike, nobody thinks very much.
Walter Lippmann
#93. It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.
Walter Lippmann
#94. If we cannot fully understand the acts of other people, until we know what they think they know, then in order to do justice we have to appraise not only the information which has been at their disposal, but the minds though which they have filtered it.
Walter Lippmann
#95. Love endures when the lovers love many things together
And not merely each other ...
Walter Lippmann
#96. In order to conduct a propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event. Access to the real environment must be limited, before anyone can create a pseudo-environment that he thinks wise or desirable. For
Walter Lippmann
#97. We know that it is possible to harness desire to many interests, that evil is one form of a desire, and not the nature of it.
Walter Lippmann
#98. We must abandon the notion that the people govern. Instead, we must adopt the theory that, by their occasional mobilisations as a majority, people support or oppose the individuals who actually govern.
Walter Lippmann
#99. We forge gradually our greatest instrument for understanding the world - introspection. We discover that humanity may resemble us very considerably - that the best way of knowing the inwardness of our neighbors is to know ourselves.
Walter Lippmann
#100. Where love exists with self-respect and joy, where a fine environment is provided for the child, where the parents live under conditions that neither stunt the imagination nor let it run to uncontrolled fantasy, there you have the family that modern men are seeking to create.
Walter Lippmann
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