Walter Lippmann Quotes
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When all men think alike, no one thinks very much.
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The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.
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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.
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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.
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The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.
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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.
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People that are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.
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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.
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When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.
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The first principle of a civilized state is that the power is legitimate only when it is under contract.
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Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main ballpark.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.
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It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It is equally true that that government is best which provides most.
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In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.
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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.
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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.
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When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers.