Walter Lippmann quotes - page 2

Industry is a better horse to ride than genius. (Walter Lippmann)
The first principle of a civilized state is that the power is legitimate only when it is under contract. View quote
Walter Lippmann
It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It is equally true that that government is best which provides most. View quote
Walter Lippmann
Only the consciousness of a purpose that is mightier than any man and worthy of all men can fortify and inspirit and compose the souls of men. View quote
Walter Lippmann
The news and the truth are not the same thing. View quote
Walter Lippmann
Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others. View quote
Walter Lippmann
To understand is not only to pardon, but in the end to love. View quote
Walter Lippmann
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. View quote
Walter Lippmann
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. View quote
Walter Lippmann
Men can know more than their ancestors did if they start with a knowledge of what their ancestors had already learned....That is why a society can be progressive only if it conserves its traditions. View quote
Walter Lippmann
The justification of majority rule in politics is not to be found in its ethical superiority. (Walter Lippmann)
With exceptions so rare they are regarded as miracles of nature, successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies. The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good but whether it is popular-not whether it will work well and prove itself but whether the active talking constituents like it immediately. Politicians rationalize this servitude by saying that in a democracy public men are the servants of the people. View quote
Walter Lippmann
...the totalitarian states, whether of the fascist or the communist persuasion, are more than superficially alike as dictatorships, in the suppression of dissent, and in operating planned and directed economies. They are profoundly alike. View quote
Walter Lippmann
The newspaper is in all its literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct. View quote
Walter Lippmann
It does not matter whether the right to govern is hereditary or obtained with the consent of the governed. A State is absolute in the sense which I have in mind when it claims the right to a monopoly of all the force within the community, to make war, to make peace, to conscript life, to tax, to establish and dis-establish property, to define crime, to punish disobedience, to control education, to supervise the family, to regulate personal habits, and to censor opinions. The modern State claims all of these powers, and, in the matter of theory, there is no real difference in the size of the claim between communists, fascists, and democrats. View quote
Walter Lippmann
When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute. View quote
Walter Lippmann
A man has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so. View quote
Walter Lippmann
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. View quote
Walter Lippmann
Brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican Party. View quote
Walter Lippmann
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. View quote
Walter Lippmann
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)
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. View quote
Walter Lippmann
When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists. View quote
Walter Lippmann
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. View quote
Walter Lippmann
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. View quote
Walter Lippmann