Walter Lippmann quotes - page 4

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)
Freedom to speak... can be maintained only by promoting debate. View quote
Walter Lippmann
Before you can begin to think about politics at all, you have to abandon the notion that there is a war between good men and bad men. View quote
Walter Lippmann
The decay of decency in the modern age, the rebellion against law and good faith, the treatment of human beings as things, as the mere instruments of power and ambition, is without a doubt the consequence of the decay of the belief in man as something more than an animal animated by highly conditioned reflexes and chemical reactions. For, unless man is something more than that, he has no rights that anyone is bound to respect, and there are no limitations upon his conduct which he is bound to obey. View quote
Walter Lippmann
The mass of the reading public is not interested in learning and assimilating the results of accurate investigation. View quote
Walter Lippmann
To keep a faith pure, man had better retire to a monastery. View quote
Walter Lippmann
It is at the cross-roads that skepticism is born, not in a hermitage. View quote
Walter Lippmann
The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal; but ideas are immortal. View quote
Walter Lippmann
Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue; it must be the intelligible consequence of it. View quote
Walter Lippmann
While the right to talk may be the beginning of freedom, the necessity of listening is what makes that right important. View quote
Walter Lippmann
We say that the truth will make us free. Yes, but that truth is a thousand truths which grow and change. (Walter Lippmann)
In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant. View quote
Walter Lippmann
A rational man acting in the real world may be defined as one who decides where he will strike a balance between what he desires and what can be done. View quote
Walter Lippmann
The devil is merely a fallen angel, and when God lost Satan he lost one of his best lieutenants. View quote
Walter Lippmann
Corrupt, stupid grasping functionaries will make at least as big a muddle of socialism as stupid, selfish and acquisitive employers can make of capitalism. View quote
Walter Lippmann
Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern. View quote
Walter Lippmann
It is easier to develop great power than it is to know how to use it wisely. View quote
Walter Lippmann
Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity. View quote
Walter Lippmann
A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. ... A great society is simply a big and complicated urban society. View quote
Walter Lippmann
Leaders are the custodians of a nation's ideals, of the beliefs it cherishes, of its permanent hopes, of the faith which makes a nation out of a mere aggregation of individuals. View quote
Walter Lippmann
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)
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. View quote
Walter Lippmann
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. View quote
Walter Lippmann
A really good diplomat does not go in for victories, even when he wins them. View quote
Walter Lippmann
And the principle which distinguishes democracy from all other forms of government is that in a democracy the opposition not only is tolerated as constitutional but must be maintained because it is in fact indispensable. View quote
Walter Lippmann