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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
Arguing
Pretenders
Temptation
Pretender
Sin
Yielded
Pride
Perennial
Divine
Possessed
Knowledge
Mission
Missions

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The devil is merely a fallen angel, and when God lost Satan he lost one of his best lieutenants.
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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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To understand is not only to pardon, but in the end to love.
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But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another?
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People who are tremendously concerned about their identification, their individuality, their self-expression, or their sense of humor, always seem to be missing the very things they pursue.
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Here lay the political genius of Franklin Roosevelt: that in his own time he knew what were the questions that had to be answered, even though he himself did not always find the full answer.
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This is one of the paradoxes of the democratic movement - that it loves a crowd and fears the individuals who compose it - that the religion of humanity should have no faith in human beings.
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A man cannot sleep in his cradle: whatever is useful must in the nature of life become useless.
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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.
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There is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral.
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The writers who have nothing to say, are the ones you can buy, the others have too high a price.
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It is at the cross-roads that skepticism is born, not in a hermitage.
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To create a minimum standard of life below which no human being can fall is the most elementary duty of the democratic state.
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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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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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There is but one bond of peace that is both permanent and enriching: The increasing knowledge of the world in which experiment occurs.
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When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.
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The public interest may be presumed to be what men would choose if they saw clearly, thought rationally, acted disinterestedly and benevolently.
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The unexamined life, said Socrates, is unfit to be lived by man. This is the virtue of liberty, and the ground on which we may justify our belief in it, that it tolerates error in order to serve truth.
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