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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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Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible. In order to conduct propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event.
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For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.
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No mariner ever enters upon a more uncharted sea than does the average human being born in the 20th century. Our ancestors know their way from birth through eternity we are puzzled about the day after tomorrow.
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Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.
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Where two factions see vividly each its own aspect, and contrive their own explanations of what they see, it is almost impossible for them to credit each other with honesty.
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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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The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble upon a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it the representative of a whole class.
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Brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican Party.
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The essential discovery of maturity has little if anything to do with information about the names, the locations, and the sequence of facts it is the acquiring of a different sense of life, a different kind of intuition about the nature of things.
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The common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialised class.
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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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There is nothing so good for the human soul as the discovery that there are ancient and flourishing civilized societies which have somehow managed to exist for many centuries and are still in being though they have had no help from the traveler in solving their problems.
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It is at the cross-roads that skepticism is born, not in a hermitage.
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The effort to calculate exactly what the voters want at each particular moment leaves out of account the fact that when they are troubled the thing the voters most want is to be told what to want.
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We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.
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Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.
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No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.
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The writers who have nothing to say, are the ones you can buy, the others have too high a price.
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The self-evident truth which makes men invincible is that inalienably they are inviolable persons.
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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.
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