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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

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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
Humans
Learns
Good
Supporter
Always
Indispensable
Statesmanship
Like
Sensible
Statesman
Opposition
Fervent
Learning
Supporters
Politics
Statesmen
Human
Glowing

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A country survives its legislation. That truth should not comfort the conservative nor depress the radical. For it means that public policy can enlarge its scope and increase its audacity, can try big experiments without trembling too much over the result. This nation could enter upon the most radical experiments and could afford to fail in them.
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The mass of the reading public is not interested in learning and assimilating the results of accurate investigation.
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A regime, an established order, is rarely overthrown by a revolutionary movement usually a regime collapses of its own weakness and corruption and then a revolutionary movement enters among the ruins and takes over the powers that have become vacant.
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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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For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.
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The principles of the good society call for a concern with an order of being - which cannot be proved existentially to the sense organs - where it matters supremely that the human person is inviolable, that reason shall regulate the will, that truth shall prevail over error.
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To keep a faith pure, man had better retire to a monastery.
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The host of men who stand between a great thinker and the average man are not automatic transmitters. They work on the ideas perhaps that is why a genius usually hates his disciples.
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Popular government has not yet been proved to guarantee, always and everywhere, good government.
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While the right to talk may be the beginning of freedom, the necessity of listening is what makes that right important.
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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.
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Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.
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Life can be swamped by sex very easily if sex is not normally satisfied.
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Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others.
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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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