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

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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.
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The wiser a man is, it seems to me, the more vividly he can see the future as part of the evolving present. He doesn't break the flow of life, he directs it, hastens it, but preserves its continuity.
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The news is not a mirror of social conditions, but the report of an aspect that has obtruded itself.
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One might point to the great illumination that has resulted from Freud's analysis of the abracadabra of our dreams. No one can any longer dismiss the fantasy because it is logically inconsistent, superficially absurd, or objectively untrue.
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Life is an irreversible process and for that reason its future can never be a repetition of the past.
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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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Behind innocence there gathers a clotted mass of superstition, of twisted and misdirected impulse clandestine flirtation, fads, and ragtime fill the unventilated mind.
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All achievement should be measured in human happiness.
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Men have been barbarians much longer than they have been civilized. They are only precariously civilized, and within us there is the propensity, persistent as the force of gravity, to revert under stress and strain, under neglect or temptation, to our first natures.
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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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There is only one purpose to which a whole society can be directed by a deliberate plan. That purpose is war, and there is no other.
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Where two factions see vividly each its own aspect, and contrive their own explanations of what they see, it is almost impossible for them to credit each other with honesty.
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The central drama of our age is how the Western nations and the Asian peoples are to find a tolerable basis of co-existence.
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Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible. In order to conduct propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event.
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Even God has been defended with nonsense.
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If somebody can create an absolute system of beliefs and rules of conduct that will guide a business man at eleven o'clock in the morning, a boy trying to select a career, a woman in an unhappy love affair--well then, surely no pragmatist will object. He insists only that philosophy shall come down to earth and be tried out there.
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Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence.
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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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All men desire their own perfect adjustment, but they desire it, being finite men, on their own terms.
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Great men, even during their lifetime, are usually known to the public only through a fictitious personality.
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