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

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What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority.
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Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings.
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We must abandon the notion that the people govern. Instead, we must adopt the theory that, by their occasional mobilisations as a majority, people support or oppose the individuals who actually govern.
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In making the great experiment of governing people by consent rather than by coercion, it is not sufficient that the party in power should have a majority. It is just as necessary that the party in power should never outrage the minority.
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Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant fail to use them and it is weak.
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The news and the truth are not the same thing.
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A man who has humility will have acquired in the last reaches of his beliefs the saving doubt of his own certainty.
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Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.
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In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant.
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Run against the grain of a nation's genius and see where you get with your laws.
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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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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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Democracy is much too important to be left to public opinion.
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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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When everyone thinks the same, nobody is thinking.
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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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For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct. It is the only serious book most people read. It is the only book they read every day.
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The simple opposition between the people and big business has disappeared because the people themselves have become so deeply involved in big business.
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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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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.
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