Walter Lippmann Quotes

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

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.

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.

When all think alike, then no one is thinking

There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.

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.

The press does not tell us what to think, it tells us what to think about.

The news and the truth are not the same thing.

The present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis in journalism.

Successful ... politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies.

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?

To create a minimum standard of life below which no human being can fall is the most elementary duty of the democratic state.

There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil.

All achievement should be measured in human happiness.

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, the quality of life they admire. All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization.

The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.

The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal; but ideas are immortal.

For in the absence of debate unrestricted utterance leads to the degradation of opinion. By a kind of Greshams law the more rational is overcome by the less rational, and the opinions that will prevail will be those which are held most ardently by those with the most passionate will. For that reason the freedom to speak can never be maintained merely by objecting to interference with the liberty of the press, of printing, of broadcasting, of the screen. It can be maintained only by promoting debate.

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

We say that the truth will make us free. Yes, but that truth is a thousand truths which grow and change.

No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.

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

When everyone thinks alike, no one thinks very much.

A regime, an established order, is rarely overthrown by a revolutionary movement; usually a regime collapses of its own weakness and corruption and then a revolutionary movement enters among the ruins and takes over the powers that have become vacant.

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.

We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.

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.

An alliance is like a chain. It is not made stronger by adding weak links to it. A great power like the United States gains no advantage and it loses prestige by offering, indeed peddling, its alliances to all and sundry. An alliance should be hard diplomatic currency, valuable and hard to get, and not inflationary paper from the mimeograph machine in the State Department.

A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern. For there is no adequate way in which it can keep itself informed about what the people of the country are thinking and doing and wanting.

Robinson Crusoe, the self-sufficient man, could not have lived in New York city.

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 must remember that in time of war what is said on the enemy's side of the front is always propaganda and what is said on our side of the front is truth and righteousness, the cause of humanity and a crusade for peace.

The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.

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.

When a man and woman are successfully in love, their whole activity is energized and victorious. They walk better, their digestion improves, they think more clearly, their secret worries drop away, the world is fresh and interesting, and they can do more than they dreamed that they could do. In love of this kind sexual intimacy is not the dead end of desire as it is in romantic or promiscuous love, but periodic affirmation of the inward delight of desire pervading an active life.

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.

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

Brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican Party.

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.

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.

There are at least two distinct selves, the public and regal self, the private and human.

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.

The Bill of Rights does not come from the people and is not subject to change by majorities. It comes from the nature of things. It declares the inalienable rights of man not only against all government but also against the people collectively.

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.