Walter Lippmann Quotes

Author Image

Walter Lippmann

Profession : Journalist

Birth : September 23, 1889

Industry is a better horse to ride than genius.

Walter Lippmann

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.

Walter Lippmann

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.

Walter Lippmann

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.

Walter Lippmann

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.

Walter Lippmann

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.

Walter Lippmann

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

Walter Lippmann

Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.

Walter Lippmann

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.

Walter Lippmann

Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.

Walter Lippmann

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

Walter Lippmann

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

Walter Lippmann

Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.

Walter Lippmann

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

Walter Lippmann

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

Walter Lippmann

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

Walter Lippmann

When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.

Walter Lippmann

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.

Walter Lippmann

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.

Walter Lippmann

People that are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.

Walter Lippmann