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

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

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Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire. All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization.
Walter Lippmann
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Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others.
Walter Lippmann
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All achievement should be measured in human happiness.
Walter Lippmann
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The function of news is to signalize an event, the functionoftruth istobring to lightthehiddenfacts, toset them into relationwith each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.Only at those points, where social conditions take recognizable and measurable shape, do the body of truth and the body of news coincide.
Walter Lippmann
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When everyone thinks alike, no one thinks very much.
Walter Lippmann
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Life can be swamped by sex very easily if sex is not normally satisfied.
Walter Lippmann
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Men have been barbarians much longer than they have been civilized. They are only precariously civilized, and within us there is the propensity, persistent as the force of gravity, to revert under stress and strain, under neglect or temptation, to our first natures.
Walter Lippmann
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Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.
Walter Lippmann
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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Newspapers necessarilyand inevitably reflect, and therefore, in greater or lesser measure, intensify, the defective organization of public opinion.
Walter Lippmann
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This is one of the paradoxes of the democratic movement - that it loves a crowd and fears the individuals who compose it - that the religion of humanity should have no faith in human beings.
Walter Lippmann
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Men fall into a routine when they are tired and slack: it has all the appearance of activity with few of its burdens.
Walter Lippmann
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The wiser a man is, it seems to me, the more vividly he can see the future as part of the evolving present. He doesn't break the flow of life, he directs it, hastens it, but preserves its continuity.
Walter Lippmann
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The essential discovery of maturity has little if anything to do with information about the names, the locations, and the sequence of facts it is the acquiring of a different sense of life, a different kind of intuition about the nature of things.
Walter Lippmann
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You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.
Walter Lippmann
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What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truth from its errors.
Walter Lippmann
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Successful ... politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies.
Walter Lippmann
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Genius sees the dynamic purpose first, find reasons afterward.
Walter Lippmann
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Unless democracy is to commit suicide by consenting to its own destruction, it will have to find some formidable answer to those who come to it saying: I demand from you in the name of your principles the rights which I shall deny to you later in the name of my principles.
Walter Lippmann