Walter Lippmann Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

The justification of majority rule in politics is not to be found in its ethical superiority.

Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.

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

You don't have to preach honesty to men with creative purpose. Let a human being throw the engines of his soul into the making of something, and the instinct of workmanship will take care of his honesty.

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.

I do not despise genius-indeed, I wish I had a basketful of it. But yet, after a great deal of experience and observation, I have become convinced that industry is a better horse to ride than genius. It may never carry any man as far as genius has carried individuals, but industry-patient, steady, intelligent industry-will carry thousands into comfort, and even celebrity; and this it does with absolute certainty.

The common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialised class.

Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination to-day, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real. They come, we imagine, directly to us without human meddling, and they are the most effortless food for the mind conceivable.

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.

There comes a time when even the reformer is compelled to face the fairly widespread suspicion of the average man that politics is an exhibition in which there is much ado about nothing.

I demand from you in the name of your principles the rights which I shall deny to you later in the name of my principles.

It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor.

Every fairly intelligent person is aware that the price of respectability is a muffled soul bent on the trivial and the mediocre.

Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue; it must be the intelligible consequence of it.

In a place where everybody thinks alike, nobody thinks very much.

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. Beyond this circle of seekers after privileges, individuals and organized minorities, he is aware of a large unorganized, indifferent mass of citizens who ask nothing in particular and rarely complain. The politician comes after a while to think that the art of politics is to satisfy the seekers after favors and to mollify the inchoate mass with noble sentiments and patriotic phrases.

Liberty without discipline cannot survive. Without order and 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 the elementary truths of human existence. They forgot that their freedom was achieved by heroic sacrifice.

What each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him...

Men are mortal, but ideas are immortal.

Freedom to speak... can be maintained only by promoting debate.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.

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

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.

Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence.

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.

The central drama of our age is how the Western nations and the Asian peoples are to find a tolerable basis of co-existence.

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

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

We must protect the right of our opponents to speak because we must hear what they have to say.

It is all very well to talk about being the captain of your soul. It is hard, and only a few heroes, saints, and geniuses have been the captains of their souls for any extended period of their lives.

When everyone thinks the same, nobody is thinking.

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.

It is impossible to abolish either with a law or an axe the desires of men.

Very few established institutions, governments and constitutions ...are ever destroyed by their enemies until they have been corrupted and weakened by their friends.

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.

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

In making the great experiment of governing people by consent rather than by coercion, it is not sufficient that the party in power should have a majority. It is just as necessary that the party in power should never outrage the minority.

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.

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