Top 100 Lippmann Quotes
#1. tocsin of an ideological crusade, has no limits," Lippmann warned.
David McCullough
#2. To Danny and Vinny, Greg Lippmann was a walking embodiment of the bond market, which is to say he was put on earth to screw the customer.
Michael Lewis
#3. If the Times gave readers far more news, then Lippmann at the Trib made the world seem far more understandable.
David Halberstam
#4. I did a really fun orange nail polish with my friend Deborah Lippmann. All of her nail polishes are named after songs so we called this one "Lara's Theme" which is really cute. It's a bright orange which is really good for summer or cheering yourself up in winter.
Lara Stone
#5. Mr. Fulbright hasn't said anything new or interesting or clever in five years; his intellectual well dried up the day after Walter Lippmann stopped writing his regular column.
Spiro T. Agnew
#6. Lippmann was very good at staying young, at not aging and becoming a prisoner of his past experiences.
David Halberstam
#7. [S]cience, to [Walter] Lippmann, embodied a deep awareness of the irrationality and partiality of all human beings, which led its possessors to oppose the will to dominate wherever it appeared.
Andrew Jewett
#9. Walter Lippmann was once asked his views on a particular topic, he is said to have replied, I don't know what I think on that one. I haven't written about it yet.
Fareed Zakaria
#10. Walter Lippmann suggests that the United States behaves like a society which thinks it is complete with no more to accomplish; that, for better or worse, we are what we are, and the only danger to our comfort is external.
Gore Vidal
#11. Each time, Lippmann would talk a mile a minute, and Danny and Vinny would stare in wonder. Their meetings acquired the flavor of a postmodern literary puzzle: The story rang true even as the narrator seemed entirely unreliable.
Michael Lewis
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. Robinson Crusoe, the self-sufficient man, could not have lived in New York city.
Walter Lippmann
#15. Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.
Walter Lippmann
#16. The plate at each point only sends back to the eye the simple colour imprinted. The other colours are destroyed by interference. The eye thus perceives at each point the constituent colour of the image.
Gabriel Lippmann
#17. There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.
Walter Lippmann
#18. Here lay the political genius of Franklin Roosevelt: that in his own time he knew what were the questions that had to be answered, even though he himself did not always find the full answer.
Walter Lippmann
#19. It was in the recognition that there is in each man a final essence, that is to say an immortal soul which only God can judge, that a limit was set upon the dominion of men over men.
Walter Lippmann
#20. The time has come to stop beating our heads against stone walls under the illusion that we have been appointed policeman to the human race.
Walter Lippmann
#21. A man cannot be a good doctor and keep telephoning his broker between patients nor a good lawyer with his eye on the ticker.
Walter Lippmann
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. The best servants of the people, like the best valets, must whisper unpleasant truths in the master's ear. It is the court fool, not the foolish courtier, whom the king can least afford to lose.
Walter Lippmann
#25. We can best understand the furies of war and politics by remembering that almost the whole of each party believes absolutely in its picture of the opposition, that it takes as fact, not what is, but what it supposes to be the fact.
Walter Lippmann
#26. Popular government has not yet been proved to guarantee, always and everywhere, good government.
Walter Lippmann
#27. Whenever we accept an idea as authority instead of as instrument, an idol is set up. We worship the plough, and not the fruit.
Walter Lippmann
#28. Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created.
Walter Lippmann
#29. In a democracy, the opposition is not only tolerated as constitutional, but must be maintained because it is indispensable.
Walter Lippmann
#30. The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully.
Walter Lippmann
#31. When the shot is afterwards subjected to white light, colour appears because of selective reflection.
Gabriel Lippmann
#32. The self-evident truth which makes men invincible is that inalienably they are inviolable persons.
Walter Lippmann
#33. The length of exposure (one minute in sunlight) is still too long for the portrait. It was fifteen minutes when I first began my work. Progress may continue.
Gabriel Lippmann
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. We are concerned in public affairs, but immersed in our private ones.
Walter Lippmann
#38. Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.
Walter Lippmann
#39. Whatever truth you contribute to the world will be one lucky shot in a thousand misses. You cannot be right by holding your breath and taking precautions.
Walter Lippmann
#40. Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.
Walter Lippmann
#41. Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.
Walter Lippmann
#42. The true speech of man is idiomatic, if not of the earth and sky, then at least of the saloon and the bleachers.
Walter Lippmann
#43. We say that the truth will make us free. Yes, but that truth is a thousand truths which grow and change.
Walter Lippmann
#44. Ours is a problem in which deception has become organized and strong; where truth is poisoned at its source; one in which the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered people.
Walter Lippmann
#45. It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor, to argue the rights of capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we come to think of the theories and abstract ideas as things in themselves.
Walter Lippmann
#46. 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
#47. The public interest may be presumed to be what men would choose if they saw clearly, thought rationally, acted disinterestedly and benevolently.
Walter Lippmann
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. There is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral.
Walter Lippmann
#51. 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
#53. The mass of the reading public is not interested in learning and assimilating the results of accurate investigation.
Walter Lippmann
#54. It seems like topsy-turvyland to make reason serve the irrational. Yet that is just what it has always done, and ought always to do.
Walter Lippmann
#55. When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.
Walter Lippmann
#56. It is impossible to abolish either with a law or an axe the desires of men.
Walter Lippmann
#57. Modern men are afraid of the past. It is a record of human achievement, but its other face is human defeat.
Walter Lippmann
#58. It is often very illuminating ... to ask yourself how you got at the facts on which you base your opinion. Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion?
Walter Lippmann
#59. The host of men who stand between a great thinker and the average man are not automatic transmitters. They work on the ideas; perhaps that is why a genius usually hates his disciples.
Walter Lippmann
#60. 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
#61. In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant.
Walter Lippmann
#62. We must remember that in time of war what is said on the enemy's side of the front is always propaganda and what is said on our side of the front is truth and righteousness, the cause of humanity and a crusade for peace.
Walter Lippmann
#63. There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil.
Walter Lippmann
#64. Usually it is the stereotyped shape assumed by an event at an obvious place that uncovers the run of the news.
Walter Lippmann
#65. In the blood of the martyrs to intolerance are the seeds of unbelief
Walter Lippmann
#66. True opinions can prevail only if the facts to which they refer are known; if they are not known, false ideas are just as effective as true ones, if not a little more effective.
Walter Lippmann
#67. There is only one purpose to which a whole society can be directed by a deliberate plan. That purpose is war, and there is no other.
Walter Lippmann
#68. Every fairly intelligent person is aware that the price of respectability is a muffled soul bent on the trivial and the mediocre.
Walter Lippmann
#69. Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings.
Walter Lippmann
#70. Lovers who have nothing to do but love each other are not really to be envied; love and nothing else very soon is nothing else.
Walter Lippmann
#71. 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
#72. To keep a faith pure, man had better retire to a monastery.
Walter Lippmann
#73. Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main ballpark.
Walter Lippmann
#74. Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern.
Walter Lippmann
#75. The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.
Walter Lippmann
#76. Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others.
Walter Lippmann
#77. The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event ... For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities.
Walter Lippmann
#78. All men desire their own perfect adjustment, but they desire it, being finite men, on their own terms.
Walter Lippmann
#79. The whole speculation about morality is an effort to find a way of living which men who live it will instinctively feel is good.
Walter Lippmann
#80. If the estimate of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs is correct, then Russia has lost the cold war in western Europe.
Walter Lippmann
#81. It is in time of peace that the value of life is fixed. The test of war reveals it.
Walter Lippmann
#82. 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
#83. Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage: it is useless to expect solutions in a political campaign.
Walter Lippmann
#84. Unless democracy is to commit suicide by consenting to its own destruction, it will have to find some formidable answer to those who come to it saying: I demand from you in the name of your principles the rights which I shall deny to you later in the name of my principles.
Walter Lippmann
#85. In the case of composite colour, an infinity of systems must be obtained for maxima infinitely slight and with an infinity of interval values separating them - that is to say, the whole thickness of the sensitive layer is occupied in continuous manner by these maxima.
Gabriel Lippmann
#86. 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
#88. 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
#89. The unexamined life, said Socrates, is unfit to be lived by man. This is the virtue of liberty, and the ground on which we may justify our belief in it, that it tolerates error in order to serve truth.
Walter Lippmann
#90. 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
#91. A regime, an established order, is rarely overthrown by a revolutionary movement; usually a regime collapses of its own weakness and corruption and then a revolutionary movement enters among the ruins and takes over the powers that have become vacant.
Walter Lippmann
#92. 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
#93. In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.
Walter Lippmann
#94. A democracy which fails to concentrate authority in an emergency inevitably falls into such confusion that the ground is prepared for the rise of a dictator.
Walter Lippmann
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.
Walter Lippmann
#99. The people who really matter in social affairs are neither those who wish to stop short like a mule, or leap from crag to crag like a mountain goat.
Walter Lippmann
#100. A more conscious life is one in which a man is conscious not only of what he sees, but of the prejudices with which he sees it.
Walter Lippmann
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