Walter Lippmann Quotations

It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.

The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.

Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.

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.

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.

What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority.

Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much.

When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.

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.

The simple opposition between the people and big business has disappeared because the people themselves have become so deeply involved in big business.

No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.

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.

Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main ballpark.

Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.

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.

The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.

Brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican Party.

When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers.

Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.

Industry is a better horse to ride than genius.

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.

The first principle of a civilized state is that the power is legitimate only when it is under contract.

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.

Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.

It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It is equally true that that government is best which provides most.

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.

A man has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.

Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues; tired of the effort of willing they become fanatics about conservatism.

In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.

Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.

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.

The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opposition than from his fervent supporters.

We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.

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.

Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings.

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.

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.

He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.

When all men think alike, no one thinks very much.

People that are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.

I would have carved on the portals of the National Press Club, "Put not your trust in princes." 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.

Nobody has worked harder at inactivity with such a force of character, with such unremitting attention to detail, with such conscientious devotion to the task

It is impossible to abolish either with a law or an ax the desires of men

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.

Where all think alike, no one thinks very much

Love endures when the lovers love many things together And not merely each other.....

The senator might remember that the Evangelists had a more inspiring subject.

Successful 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 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. . .

All achievement should be measured in human happiness.

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.

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.

In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant.

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.

Every fairly intelligent person is aware that the price of respectability is a muffled soul bent on the trivial and the mediocre.

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.

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.

The press does not tell us what to think, it tells us what to think about.

There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.

To keep a faith pure, man had better retire to a monastery.

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.

The self-evident truth which makes men invincible is that inalienably they are inviolable persons.

The public must be put in its place, so that it may exercise its own powers, but no less and perhaps even more, so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.

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.

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.

Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence.

While the right to talk may be the beginning of freedom, the necessity of listening is what makes that right important.

The news and the truth are not the same thing.

A man who has humility will have acquired in the last reaches of his beliefs the saving doubt of his own certainty.

The common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialised class.

Politicians tend to live "in character" and many a public figure has come to imitate the journalism that describes him.

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.

Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity.

It is at the cross-roads that skepticism is born, not in a hermitage.

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.

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.

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.

To create a minimum standard of life below which no human being can fall is the most elementary duty of the democratic state.

In a democracy, the opposition is not only tolerated as constitutional, but must be maintained because it is indispensable.

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.

A really good diplomat does not go in for victories, even when he wins them.

Whenever we accept an idea as authority instead of as instrument, an idol is set up. We worship the plough, and not the fruit.

A large plural society cannot be governed without recognizing that, transcending its plural interests, there is a rational order with a superior common law.

Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character.

Democracy is much too important to be left to public opinion.

When all think alike, then no one is thinking

The present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis in journalism.

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.

Men fall into a routine when they are tired and slack: it has all the appearance of activity with few of its burdens.

Corrupt, stupid grasping functionaries will make at least as big a muddle of socialism as stupid, selfish and acquisitive employers can make of capitalism.

Successful ... 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.

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?

The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal; but ideas are immortal.

When a man and woman are successfully in love, their whole activity is energized and victorious. They walk better, their digestion improves, they think more clearly, their secret worries drop away, the world is fresh and interesting, and they can do more than they dreamed that they could do. In love of this kind sexual intimacy is not the dead end of desire as it is in romantic or promiscuous love, but periodic affirmation of the inward delight of desire pervading an active life.

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.