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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.
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
Must
Insight
Moralist
Necessarily
Custom
Seek
Prophecy
Taught
Preach
Teach
Revealed
Age
Reveal
Rather
Customs
Cannot
Ages
Unsettled
More quotes by Walter Lippmann
The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.
Walter Lippmann
There comes a time when even the reformer is compelled to face the fairly widespread suspicion of the average man that politics is an exhibition in which there is much ado about nothing.
Walter Lippmann
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
The host of men who stand between a great thinker and the average man are not automatic transmitters. They work on the ideas perhaps that is why a genius usually hates his disciples.
Walter Lippmann
When all think alike, then no one is thinking
Walter Lippmann
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.
Walter Lippmann
The invisible government [bosses] is malign. But the evil doesn't come from the fact that it plays horse with the Newtonian theory of the constitution. What is dangerous about it is that we do not see it, cannot use it, and are compelled to submit to it.
Walter Lippmann
Yet this corporate being, though so insubstantial to our senses, binds, in Burkes words, a man to his country with ties which though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. That is why young men die in battle for their countrys sake and why old men plant trees they will never sit under.
Walter Lippmann
No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.
Walter Lippmann
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.
Walter Lippmann
Usually it is the stereotyped shape assumed by an event at an obvious place that uncovers the run of the news.
Walter Lippmann
It seems like topsy-turvyland to make reason serve the irrational. Yet that is just what it has always done, and ought always to do.
Walter Lippmann
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
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.
Walter Lippmann
It is at the cross-roads that skepticism is born, not in a hermitage.
Walter Lippmann
Creative ideas come to the intuitive person who can face up to the insecurity of looking beyond the obvious.
Walter Lippmann
The unions are the first feeble effort to conquer the industrial jungle for democratic life. They may not succeed, but if they don't their failure will be a tragedy for civilization, a loss of cooperative effort, a baulking of energy, and the fixing in American life of a class-structure.
Walter Lippmann
The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully.
Walter Lippmann
Industry is a better horse to ride than genius.
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
