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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.

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
Notion
Collapses
Touch
Balloon
Beings
Logically
Belief
Balloons
Political
Biographies
Human
Collapse
Humans
Beliefs
Like
Determined
Pricked

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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 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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Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.
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Very few established institutions, governments and constitutions ...are ever destroyed by their enemies until they have been corrupted and weakened by their friends.
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In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant.
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Whatever truth you contribute to the world will be one lucky shot in a thousand misses. You cannot be right by holding your breath and taking precautions.
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The American's conviction that he must be able to look any man in the eye and tell him to go to hell is the very essence of the free man's way of life.
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Creative ideas come to the intuitive person who can face up to the insecurity of looking beyond the obvious.
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A democracy which fails to concentrate authority in an emergency inevitably falls into such confusion that the ground is prepared for the rise of a dictator.
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You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.
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The public must be put in its place, so that it may exercise its own powers, but no less and perhaps even more, so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.
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Usually it is the stereotyped shape assumed by an event at an obvious place that uncovers the run of the news.
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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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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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Lovers who have nothing to do but love each other are not really to be envied love and nothing else very soon is nothing else.
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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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Even God has been defended with nonsense.
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Ours is a problem in which deception has become organized and strong where truth is poisoned at its source one in which the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered people.
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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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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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