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The private citizen, beset by partisan appeals for the loan of his Public Opinion, will soon see, perhaps, that these appeals are not a compliment to his intelligence, but an imposition on his good nature and an insult to his sense of evidence.

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
Nature
Intelligence
Partisans
Good
Soon
Comeback
Evidence
Loan
Citizens
Compliment
Perhaps
Citizen
Opinion
Insult
Beset
Public
Appeals
Imposition
Sense
Private
Partisan

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Men are mortal, but ideas are immortal.
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Before you can begin to think about politics at all, you have to abandon the notion that there is a war between good men and bad men.
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We forge gradually our greatest instrument for understanding the world - introspection. We discover that humanity may resemble us very considerably - that the best way of knowing the inwardness of our neighbors is to know ourselves.
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Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity.
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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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In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.
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To create a minimum standard of life below which no human being can fall is the most elementary duty of the democratic state.
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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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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.
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The self-evident truth which makes men invincible is that inalienably they are inviolable persons.
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The Bill of Rights does not come from the people and is not subject to change by majorities. It comes from the nature of things. It declares the inalienable rights of man not only against all government but also against the people collectively.
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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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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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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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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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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 smashing of idols is in itself such a preoccupation that it is almost impossible for the iconoclast to look clearly into a future when there will not be many idols left to smash.
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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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Here lay the political genius of Franklin Roosevelt: that in his own time he knew what were the questions that had to be answered, even though he himself did not always find the full answer.
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Inevitably our opinions cover a bigger space, a longer reach of time, a greater number of things, than we can directly observe. They have, therefore, to be pieced together out of what others have reported and what we can imagine.
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