Walter Lippmann quotes

It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf. (Walter Lippmann)
When all think alike, then no one is thinking.
Walter Lippmann
Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.
Walter Lippmann
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
There is no arguing with the pretenders to a divine knowledge and to a divine mission. They are possessed with the sin of pride, they have yielded to the perennial temptation.
Walter Lippmann
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
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
Whether or not birth control is eugenic, hygienic, and economic, it is the most revolutionary practice in the history of sexual morals.
Walter Lippmann
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. . .
Walter Lippmann
Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.
Walter Lippmann
The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief... that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart. (Walter Lippmann)
There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.
Walter Lippmann
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
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
If the estimate of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs is correct, then Russia has lost the cold war in western Europe.
Walter Lippmann
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
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
The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opposition than from his fervent supporters.
Walter Lippmann
Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.
Walter Lippmann
The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.
Walter Lippmann
When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers. (Walter Lippmann)
The simple opposition between the people and big business has disappeared because the people themselves have become so deeply involved in big business.
Walter Lippmann
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
No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.
Walter Lippmann
Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.
Walter Lippmann