Quote

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.

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
Taught
Preach
Teach
Revealed
Age
Reveal
Rather
Customs
Cannot
Ages
Unsettled
Must
Insight
Moralist
Necessarily
Custom
Seek
Prophecy

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Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character.
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Where love exists with self-respect and joy, where a fine environment is provided for the child, where the parents live under conditions that neither stunt the imagination nor let it run to uncontrolled fantasy, there you have the family that modern men are seeking to create.
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In government offices which are sensitive to the vehemence and passion of mass sentiment public men have no sure tenure. They are in effect perpetual office seekers, always on trial for their political lives, always required to court their restless constituents.
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The consent of the governed is more than a safeguard against ignorant tyrants: it is an insurance against benevolent despots as well.
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Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created.
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Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.
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The search for moral guidance which shall not depend upon external authority has invariably ended in the acknowledgment of some new authority.
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The size of a man's income has considerable effect on his access to the world beyond his neighborhood. With money he can overcome almost every tangible obstacle of communication, he can travel, buy books and periodicals, and bring within the range of his attention almost any known fact of the world.
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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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Life is an irreversible process and for that reason its future can never be a repetition of the past.
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Creative ideas come to the intuitive person who can face up to the insecurity of looking beyond the obvious.
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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.
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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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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.
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A more conscious life is one in which a man is conscious not only of what he sees, but of the prejudices with which he sees it.
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The press does not tell us what to think, it tells us what to think about.
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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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