Walter Lippmann Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Walter Lippmann
Walter Lippmann Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Walter Lippmann on Wise Famous Quotes.
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 whole speculation about morality is an effort to find a way of living which men who live it will instinctively feel is good.
The search for moral guidance which shall not depend upon external authority has invariably ended in the acknowledgment of some new authority.
The first principle of a civilized state is that the power is legitimate only when it is under contract.
It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It is equally true that that government is best which provides most.
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.
Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created.
A more conscious life is one in which a man is conscious not only of what he sees, but of the prejudices with which he sees it.
The man who raises new issues has always been distasteful to politicians. He musses up what had been so tidily arranged.
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.
Great men, even during their lifetime, are usually known to the public only through a fictitious personality.
If the estimate of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs is correct, then Russia has lost the cold war in western Europe.
A man who has humility will have acquired in the last reaches of his beliefs the saving doubt of his own certainty.
It seems like topsy-turvyland to make reason serve the irrational. Yet that is just what it has always done, and ought always to do.
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.
Whenever we accept an idea as authority instead of as instrument, an idol is set up. We worship the plough, and not the fruit.
We know that it is possible to harness desire to many interests, that evil is one form of a desire, and not the nature of it.
Modern men are afraid of the past. It is a record of human achievement, but its other face is human defeat.
We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.
Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage: it is useless to expect solutions in a political campaign.
Certainly he is not of the generation that regards honesty as the best policy. However, he does regard it as a policy.
The emancipated woman has to fight something worse than the crusted prejudices of her uncles; she has to fight the bewilderment in her own soul.
In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.
We say that the truth will make us free. Yes, but that truth is a thousand truths which grow and change.
The public interest may be presumed to be what men would choose if they saw clearly, thought rationally, acted disinterestedly and benevolently.
There is but one bond of peace that is both permanent and enriching: The increasing knowledge of the world in which experiment occurs.
Each of us lives and works on a small part of the earth's surface, moves in a small circle, and of these acquaintances knows only a few intimately.
All men desire their own perfect adjustment, but they desire it, being finite men, on their own terms.
Politicians tend to live "in character" and many a public figure has come to imitate the journalism that describes him.
Whether or not birth control is eugenic, hygienic, and economic, it is the most revolutionary practice in the history of sexual morals.
A man cannot be a good doctor and keep telephoning his broker between patients nor a good lawyer with his eye on the ticker.
Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.
No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.
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.
Creative ideas come to the intuitive person who can face up to the insecurity of looking beyond the obvious.
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 central drama of our age is how the Western nations and the Asian peoples are to find a tolerable basis of co-existence.
The people who really matter in social affairs are neither those who wish to stop short like a mule, or leap from crag to crag like a mountain goat.
Life is an irreversible process and for that reason its future can never be a repetition of the past.
Men fall into a routine when they are tired and slack: it has all the appearance of activity with few of its burdens.
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.
Whereas each man claims his freedom as a matter of right, the freedom he accords to other men is a matter of toleration.
In a democracy, the opposition is not only tolerated as constitutional, but must be maintained because it is indispensable.
Usually it is the stereotyped shape assumed by an event at an obvious place that uncovers the run of the news.
There is only one purpose to which a whole society can be directed by a deliberate plan. That purpose is war, and there is no other.
A man has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.
Every fairly intelligent person is aware that the price of respectability is a muffled soul bent on the trivial and the mediocre.
So far as I am concerned I have no doctrinaire belief in free speech. In the interest of the war it is necessary to sacrifice some of it.