Walter Lippmann Quotes
It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.
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.
He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.
There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.
To create a minimum standard of life below which no human being can fall is the most elementary duty of the democratic state.
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 final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.
There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil.
The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal; but ideas are immortal.
We say that the truth will make us free. Yes, but that truth is a thousand truths which grow and change.
The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opposition than from his fervent supporters.
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.
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.
No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.
While the right to talk may be the beginning of freedom, the necessity of listening is what makes that right important.
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.
The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.
We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.
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.
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.
Corrupt, stupid grasping functionaries will make at least as big a muddle of socialism as stupid, selfish and acquisitive employers can make of capitalism.
Very few established institutions, governments and constitutions ...are ever destroyed by their enemies until they have been corrupted and weakened by their friends.
Every fairly intelligent person is aware that the price of respectability is a muffled soul bent on the trivial and the mediocre.
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 genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully.
There are at least two distinct selves, the public and regal self, the private and human.
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.
In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.
Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue; it must be the intelligible consequence of it.
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 consent of the governed" is more than a safeguard against ignorant tyrants: it is an insurance against benevolent despots as well.
Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.
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 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.
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.
