Walter Lippmann Quotes (101 Quotes)

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

There is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral.

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 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.

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

The writers who have nothing to say are the ones you can buy the others have too high a price.

In really hard times the rules of the game are altered. The inchoate mass begins to stir. It becomes potent, and when it strikes, . . . it strikes with incredible emphasis. Those are the rare occasions when a national will emerges. . .

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

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.

When all think alike, then no one is thinking.

The ordinary politician has a very low estimate of human nature. In his daily life he comes into contact chiefly with persons who want to get something or to avoid something.

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

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

In the course of a debate with Lewis Terman Without offering any data on all that occurs between conception and the age of kindergarten, they announce on the basis of what they have got out of a few thousand questionnaires that they are measuring the hereditary mental endowment of human beings. Obviously, this is not a conclusion obtained by research. It is a conclusion planted by the will to believe. It is, I think, for the most part unconsciously planted.... If the impression takes root that these tests really measure intelligence, that they constitute a sort of last judgment on the child's capacity, that they reveal 'scientifically' his predestined ability, then it would be a thousand times better if all the intelligence testers and all their questionnaires were sunk in the Sargasso Sea.

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

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.

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.

Unless democracy is to commit suicide by consenting to its own destruction, it will have to find some formidable answer to those who come to it saying I demand from you in the name of your principles the rights which I shall deny to you later. . .

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

What a shame to waste those great shots on the practice tee.

The principle of majority rule is the mildest form in which the force of numbers can be exercised. It is a pacific substitute for civil war in which the opposing armies are counted and the victory is awarded to the larger before any blood is shed.

Without order or authority in the spirit of man the free way of life leads through weakness, disorganization, self-indulgence, and moral indifference to the destruction of freedom itself. The tragic ordeal through which the Western world is passing was prepared in the long period of easy liberty, during which men ... forgot that their freedom was achieved by heroic sacrifice.... They forgot that their rights were founded on their duties.... They thought it clever to be cynical, enlightened to be unbelieving, and sensible to be soft.

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

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

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

You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.

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.

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.

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

When all think alike, no one is thinking very much.

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

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.

There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil - remain detached from the great

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.

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.

Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created. The average conservative is a slave to the most incidental and trivial part of his forefathers' glory. . .

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.

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

Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others.

At the core of every moral code there is a picture of human nature, a map of the universe, and a version of history. To human nature (of the sort conceived), in a universe (of the kind imagined), after a history (so understood), the rules of the code apply.

There is nothing so bad that it cannot masquerade as moral.

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

In the blood of the martyrs to intolerance are the seeds of unbelief.

Certainly he is not of the generation that regards honesty as the best policy. However, he does regard it as a policy.

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

True opinions can prevail only if the facts to which they refer are known if they are not known, false ideas are just as effective as true ones, if not a little more effective.

Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power.

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.

Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate. . .