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

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When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.
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Corrupt, stupid grasping functionaries will make at least as big a muddle of socialism as stupid, selfish and acquisitive employers can make of capitalism.
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It is not the idea as such which the censor attacks, whether it be heresy or radicalism or obscenity. He attacks the circulation of the idea among the classes which in his judgment are not to be trusted with the idea.
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To understand is not only to pardon, but in the end to love.
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The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.
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We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception.
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The people who really matter in social affairs are neither those who wish to stop short like a mule, or leap from crag to crag like a mountain goat.
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There comes a time when even the reformer is compelled to face the fairly widespread suspicion of the average man that politics is an exhibition in which there is much ado about nothing.
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In the blood of the martyrs to intolerance are the seeds of unbelief
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A rational man acting in the real world may be defined as one who decides where he will strike a balance between what he desires and what can be done.
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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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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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A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. ... A great society is simply a big and complicated urban society.
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It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It is equally true that that government is best which provides most.
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It is better to catch the idol-maker than to smash each idol.
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Love endures when the lovers love many things together And not merely each other.
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We say that the truth will make us free. Yes, but that truth is a thousand truths which grow and change.
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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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It is at the cross-roads that skepticism is born, not in a hermitage.
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Our life is managed from behind the scenes: we are actors in dramas that we cannot interpret. Of almost no decisive event can we say: this was our own choosing. We happen upon careers, necessity pushing, blind inclination pulling. If we stop to think we are amazed that we should be what we are.
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