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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.

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
Time
Wall
Policemen
Stop
Antiwar
Race
Beating
Peace
Walls
War
Heads
Human
Stone
Humans
Stones
Policeman
Come
Illusion
Appointed

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All men desire their own perfect adjustment, but they desire it, being finite men, on their own terms.
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Ages when custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy. The moralist cannot teach what is revealed he must reveal what can be taught. He has to seek insight rather than to preach.
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You and I are forever at the mercy of the census-taker and the census-maker. That impertinent fellow who goes from house to house is one of the real masters of the statistical situation. The other is the man who organizes the results.
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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.
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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.
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Industry is a better horse to ride than genius.
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When everyone thinks alike, no one thinks very much.
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People who are tremendously concerned about their identification, their individuality, their self-expression, or their sense of humor, always seem to be missing the very things they pursue.
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The man who raises new issues has always been distasteful to politicians. He musses up what had been so tidily arranged.
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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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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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To keep a faith pure, man had better retire to a monastery.
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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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Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity.
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So far as I am concerned I have no doctrinaire belief in free speech. In the interest of the war it is necessary to sacrifice some of it.
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The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.
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