Walter Lippmann Quotes
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Brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican Party.
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The simple opposition between the people and big business has disappeared because the people themselves have become so deeply involved in big business.
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It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.
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The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opposition than from his fervent supporters.
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Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings.
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He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.
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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.
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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.
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Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.
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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.
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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.
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Industry is a better horse to ride than genius.
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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.
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We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.
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Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.
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Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much.
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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.
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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.
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The newspaper is in all its literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct.
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Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.
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A man has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.
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Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.
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No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.
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The central drama of our age is how the Western nations and the Asian peoples are to find a tolerable basis of co-existence.