Walter Lippmann Quotes

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Walter Lippmann

Profession : Journalist

Birth : September 23, 1889

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

Walter Lippmann

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

Walter Lippmann

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.

Walter Lippmann

Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much.

Walter Lippmann

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

Walter Lippmann

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

Walter Lippmann

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

Walter Lippmann

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.

Walter Lippmann

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.

Walter Lippmann

When all men think alike, no one thinks very much.

Walter Lippmann

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.

Walter Lippmann

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

Walter Lippmann

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.

Walter Lippmann

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

Walter Lippmann

Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main ballpark.

Walter Lippmann

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.

Walter Lippmann

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.

Walter Lippmann

The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.

Walter Lippmann

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.

Walter Lippmann

Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings.

Walter Lippmann