Top 255 Quotes & Sayings by Walter Lippmann
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American journalist Walter Lippmann.
Last updated on September 15, 2024.
The best servants of the people, like the best valets, must whisper unpleasant truths in the master's ear. It is the court fool, not the foolish courtier, whom the king can least afford to lose.
Brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican Party.
Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main ballpark.
When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.
The simple opposition between the people and big business has disappeared because the people themselves have become so deeply involved in big business.
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.
Ages when custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy. The moralist cannot teach what is revealed; he must reveal what can be taught. He has to seek insight rather than to preach.
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.
In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.
We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.
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.
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 great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.
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.
People that are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.
When all men think alike, no one thinks very much.
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.
A man has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.
The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.
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.
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.
Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.
Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much.
The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opposition than from his fervent supporters.
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.
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.
Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.
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.
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.
Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings.
Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.
Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.
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.
When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers.
Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.
Industry is a better horse to ride than genius.
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.
It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It is equally true that that government is best which provides most.
The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.
It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.
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.
The first principle of a civilized state is that the power is legitimate only when it is under contract.
He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.
No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.
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.
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 news and the truth are not the same thing.
There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil.
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 so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor.
The present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis in journalism.
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?
We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception.
When all think alike, then no one is thinking
The press does not tell us what to think, it tells us what to think about.
There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.
Democracy is much too important to be left to public opinion.
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.
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 only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event ... For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities.
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