Quote

Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant fail to use them and it is weak.

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
Weak
Failing
Statesmanship
Progress
Symptoms
Movement
Movements
Use
Irrelevant
Social
Ignore
Instruments
Fail

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Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.
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Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.
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The true speech of man is idiomatic, if not of the earth and sky, then at least of the saloon and the bleachers.
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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.
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Genius sees the dynamic purpose first, find reasons afterward.
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Ours is a problem in which deception has become organized and strong where truth is poisoned at its source one in which the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered people.
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The justification of majority rule in politics is not to be found in its ethical superiority.
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Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings.
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What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority.
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The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief... that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.
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Whatever truth you contribute to the world will be one lucky shot in a thousand misses. You cannot be right by holding your breath and taking precautions.
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Here lay the political genius of Franklin Roosevelt: that in his own time he knew what were the questions that had to be answered, even though he himself did not always find the full answer.
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