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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.
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
Provides
Equally
Perfectly
Least
True
Government
Best
Governs
More quotes by Walter Lippmann
And the principle which distinguishes democracy from all other forms of government is that in a democracy the opposition not only is tolerated as constitutional but must be maintained because it is in fact indispensable.
Walter Lippmann
The time has come to stop beating our heads against stone walls under the illusion that we have been appointed policeman to the human race.
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Whenever we accept an idea as authority instead of as instrument, an idol is set up. We worship the plough, and not the fruit.
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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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The devil is merely a fallen angel, and when God lost Satan he lost one of his best lieutenants.
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Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power.
Walter Lippmann
The unexamined life, said Socrates, is unfit to be lived by man. This is the virtue of liberty, and the ground on which we may justify our belief in it, that it tolerates error in order to serve truth.
Walter Lippmann
Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue it must be the intelligible consequence of it.
Walter Lippmann
Life can be swamped by sex very easily if sex is not normally satisfied.
Walter Lippmann
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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Modern men are afraid of the past. It is a record of human achievement, but its other face is human defeat.
Walter Lippmann
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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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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A democracy which fails to concentrate authority in an emergency inevitably falls into such confusion that the ground is prepared for the rise of a dictator.
Walter Lippmann
It is impossible to abolish either with a law or an axe the desires of men.
Walter Lippmann
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.
Walter Lippmann
Whether or not birth control is eugenic, hygienic, and economic, it is the most revolutionary practice in the history of sexual morals.
Walter Lippmann
It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor.
Walter Lippmann
It is at the cross-roads that skepticism is born, not in a hermitage.
Walter Lippmann
Every fairly intelligent person is aware that the price of respectability is a muffled soul bent on the trivial and the mediocre.
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