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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

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Walter Lippmann
Age: 85 †
Born: 1889
Born: September 23
Died: 1974
Died: December 14
Journalist
Politician
Writer
New York City
New York
Divine
Perennial
Knowledge
Possessed
Mission
Missions
Arguing
Temptation
Pretenders
Sin
Pretender
Pride
Yielded

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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.
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It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.
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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?
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The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.
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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.
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A better distribution of incomes would increase that efficiency by diverting a great fund of wealth from the useless to the useful members of society. To cut off the income of the useless will not impair their efficiency. They have none to impair. It will, in fact, compel them to acquire a useful function.
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And the principle which distinguishes democracy from all other forms of government is that in a democracy the opposition not only is tolerated as constitutional but must be maintained because it is in fact indispensable.
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The consent of the governed is more than a safeguard against ignorant tyrants: it is an insurance against benevolent despots as well.
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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.
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What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truth from its errors.
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The search for moral guidance which shall not depend upon external authority has invariably ended in the acknowledgment of some new authority.
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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.
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Whereas each man claims his freedom as a matter of right, the freedom he accords to other men is a matter of toleration.
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A useful definition of liberty is obtained only by seeking the principle of liberty in the main business of human life, that is to say, in the process by which men educate their responses and learn to control their environment.
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Liberty may be an uncomfortable blessing unless you know what to do with it. That is why so many freed slaves returned to their masters, why so many emancipated women are only too glad to give up the racket and settle down. For between announcing that you will live your own life, and the living of it lie the real difficulties of any awakening.
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Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.
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Whether or not birth control is eugenic, hygienic, and economic, it is the most revolutionary practice in the history of sexual morals.
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There is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral.
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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.
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We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.
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