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The best servants of the people, like the best valets, must whisper unpleasant truths in the master's ear. It is the court fool, not the foolish courtier, whom the king can least afford to lose.

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
Lose
Foolish
Courtiers
Loses
King
Valet
Least
Master
Unpleasant
Best
Ears
Whisper
Must
Kings
Servants
Like
Court
Truths
People
Masters
Afford
Valets
Fool
Servant
Courtier

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

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The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble upon a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it the representative of a whole class.
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When men are brought face to face with their opponents, forced to listen and learn and mend their ideas, they cease to be children and savages and begin to live like civilized men. Then only is freedom a reality, when men may voice their opinions because they must examine their opinions.
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Brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican Party.
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In a place where everybody thinks alike, nobody thinks very much.
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We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.
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It is often very illuminating...to ask yourself how you got at the facts on which you base your opinion. Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion?
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Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.
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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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Even God has been defended with nonsense.
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It is better to catch the idol-maker than to smash each idol.
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It is impossible to abolish either with a law or an axe the desires of men.
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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 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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The whole speculation about morality is an effort to find a way of living which men who live it will instinctively feel is good.
Walter Lippmann
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Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination to-day, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real. They come, we imagine, directly to us without human meddling, and they are the most effortless food for the mind conceivable.
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The true speech of man is idiomatic, if not of the earth and sky, then at least of the saloon and the bleachers.
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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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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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The prophecy of a world moving toward political unity is the light which guides all that is best, most vigorous, most truly alive in the work of our time.
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There is nothing disastrous in the temporary nature of our ideas. They are always that. But there may very easily be a train of evil in the self-deception which regards them as final. I think God will forgive us our skepticism sooner than our Inquisitions.
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